“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 according to Rowland Bowen, one of the contemporary criticisms of W. G. Grace was 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. 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?

Wronged Cricketer, Wrong Man: The Controversial Tale of Fitz Hinds

Fitz Hinds in 1902, while playing for the a combined West Indies team against R. A. Bennett’s XI in Barbados

The first tour of England by a West Indies cricket team took place in 1900. It was a very low key affair, particularly after the visitors suffered heavy defeats in the opening games, causing the press and public lose interest. But results turned around so that when the team returned home, the overwhelming consensus was that the tour had been a success, and that the team had improved consistently throughout. At a time when the cricket-playing territories in the Caribbean were part of the British Empire, and life in those colonies was dominated by the white minority, it is perhaps unsurprising that ten of the fifteen players who formed the West Indies team were white. Most achieved little and have left little trace in the annals of cricket. The other five were black. Lebrun Constantine (who became more famous as the father of Learie) and Charles Ollivierre had the best batting records of the summer; both went on to have long and distinguished careers. The leading bowlers were the black professionals Tommy Burton and Joseph Woods. The final black player achieved little during the tour and even to those who follow cricket history closely is little more than a name. But of all the players who took part on that tour, the long-forgotten Fitz Hinds perhaps had more impact than any other, albeit inadvertently. An incident involving him in 1899, before he was selected for the tour of England, dragged the controversial (and as far as cricket in the Caribbean was concerned, very topical) issues of professionalism and racial discrimination into the spotlight. The dispute is not well-known but has received considerable attention in the academic world. But for all his importance, Hinds himself is largely a mystery; and, as it happens, even the name by which he is known in the cricket world is incorrect.

Anyone who looks on CricketArchive or ESPNcricinfo, or even in the pages of Wisden (which records his feat of taking ten wickets in a first-class innings), will find a man listed as Delmont Cameron St Clair Hinds. This person certainly existed, but he was not the cricketer Fitz Hinds. Nor will anyone who tries to find out more about Hinds have much luck in the usual places. His first-class career was brief and does not even include his greatest achievement because the 1900 tour of England never received first-class status.

However, Fitz Hinds shot to unwanted fame before he had been chosen for the West Indies. The story was rediscovered nearly thirty years ago by Professor Brian Stoddart and has featured in most academic studies of Caribbean cricket in this period. For it to make sense, a little more background is needed. Cricket had been introduced into the Caribbean as a recreation for white people, but had been gradually adopted by black and other non-white communities. However, in first-class cricket played between the various British colonies — the Intercolonial Tournament — the white selectors refused to include black cricketers in any of the teams. The Trinidad establishment was the most eager to include black players — not least because the leading bowlers on the island were black and any team without their inclusion was immeasurably weaker — but Barbados in particular was resistant and made it clear that its team would refuse to take the field against any opposition that included black players.

This racial discrimination was dressed up in more polite fashion. The ostensible reason for the omission was a desire for West Indian cricket to remain amateur. Throughout the Caribbean, there were several professional cricketers, and all were black. Their roles usually involved bowling to members in the nets rather than playing for clubs. However, in Barbados (although not in Trindiad, where black professionals appeared for Trinidad in first-class matches played outside the Intercolonial Tournament) it was unthinkable for these professionals to appear in representative cricket. The distinctions even spread further down the cricketing ladder. The premier competition in Barbados, the Barbados Cricket Challenge Cup (BCCC), was an all-white affair until 1893 when Spartan Cricket Club was formed for those non-white players who were refused admission to other clubs. But the intended membership was the emerging black middle-class, certainly not professionals nor even the working classes. At the same time, Fenwick Cricket Club was formed for working class black players, but it was excluded from the BCCC; instead it played “friendly” games against the other clubs, which Fenwick usually won by the end of the 1890s.

It was into this world that Fitz Hinds emerged as a talented cricketer in the late 1890s. He was one of the black professionals engaged by Pickwick, one of the all-white clubs, to bowl at members in the nets. Away from the cricket field, he worked as a painter. For reasons that are unclear (but could for example be explained if he had completed an apprenticeship as a painter and began working full-time in that role), he decided to leave Pickwick and play cricket as an amateur. The fall-out was considerable and even impacted on the 1900 tour of England.

Hinds attempted to join Spartan as an ordinary member (i.e. as an amateur, not a professional). Like all such clubs, acceptance of the application depended on the existing members and several were dubious at having an ex-professional at the club, particularly a man working in such a menial occupation as a painter. After some intense lobbying by his supporters, he was finally granted membership in mid-1899, but the other clubs in the BCCC were horrified at the idea of facing a former professional on the field. Pickwick were particularly unhappy as Hinds had been their employee. Even some of the Spartan members refused to take part in practice sessions with Hinds. But the attitude of those who refused to play against Hinds affected the integrity of the competition; their clubs were forced to field weakened teams which proved no match for Spartan, which won the BCCC for the first time. Hinds did moderately well, averaging 15 with the bat and taking 22 wickets with the ball at an average of under 7. His best performance came against his former club Pickwick, when he scored 24 and then took eight for 31.

The ensuing controversy — known as the “Fitz Lily affair” (according to Stoddart, “Fitz Lily” was a pseudonym of Hinds) — reverberated for some time. Although never publicly admitted, it was Hinds’ race that presented the biggest problem for the white clubs. In the world of Caribbean cricket at this time, “professional” was a synonym for black; and a professional cricketer always meant a black working-class cricketer. But colour was not the only factor. As Stoddart puts it, Hinds faced “intense pressure which arose from the social layering of Barbadian cricket, itself produced by the island’s sugar culture which allocated all members of the community a rank in its elaborately defined production hierarchy. It is important to note that colour was not the sole, or even the important, issue in the Hinds case; it was social position, as his rough treatment inside Spartan indicated. Barbadian cricket ideology and its imperial model demanded a minimum status for admission to its organized ranks.”

However, not every white player was opposed to Hinds taking part in the BCCC. One notable supporter was Clifford Goodman of Wanderers Cricket Club. He backed Hinds at the time and later wrote of him: “By his good behaviour, pluck and hard work in every department of the game, [Hinds] won golden opinions from even the bitterest of his opponents.” But even the differing attitudes among Hinds’ opponents had a deeper explanation: the social background of the white players, as Clem Seecharan has stated in Muscular Learning (2006). There were two distinct white classes in Barbados: the rich and influential plantation owners had always kept their distance from the merchants and commercial traders who formed the next “rung” on the social ladder and were regarded as “newcomers”. This distinction was also visible in cricket: of the two main white teams, Wanderers was the club of the elite, the plantation owners, while Pickwick was comprised of the merchant class. Seecharan writes: “Although [Pickwick] were no less accomplished cricketers, they still harboured an inferiority complex rooted in the old hierarchy. It is significant that the socially preponderant, and therefore more confident, Wanderers seemed to have evinced no opposition to the selection of a so-called professional (Hinds) by Spartan, the club of the coloured and black upper middle class.”

In this period, these older distinctions had begun to fade as in Barbados’ uncertain economic climate; for example, the commercial class had begun to buy plantations that were in financial difficulties. But cricket was further behind. Seecharan writes: “But the differential social distinction lingered, in this parochial little world, fostering a resilient taint on the new money of the commercial elite.” Wider society was somewhat more progressive than the cricket clubs; for example, the Barbados Bulletin complained about Hinds’ non-selection for the Barbados team that played in the Intercolonial Tournament. The editor of the Barbados Globe also took issue with Pickwick’s “stubborn refusal” to play against “poor coloured men”. Cricket, however, simply tightened the restrictions. While the 1900 tour was ongoing, Fenwick were refused full admission to the BCCC; they were allowed to play the other teams as an “associate member” but could not win the cup and once again several white players refused to take the field against them.

But the problem for Barbados cricket was that Hinds was clearly among the best cricketers on the island. And when the time came to choose a team to tour England in 1900, the selectors — appointed from each of the main cricket-playing territories in the Caribbean — picked Hinds. Furthermore, because he was no longer professional, he was chosen as an amateur, nominally of the same status as the white members of the team. To some in Barbados cricket, this was simply unacceptable. Another Barbados cricketer who had been selected in the West Indies team was Hallam Cole, a Pickwick player. When Hinds was chosen, Cole wrote to the selection committee threatening to withdraw if Hinds were selected as an amateur. He had no apparent issue with other black players in the team (including the two Barbados-born professionals Woods and Burton, who had moved to Trinidad to further their cricket careers, and the two amateurs Constantine and Ollivierre), but Hinds was the non-white Barbados-based player.

It should be made clear that the other two white Barbadian team members did not share Cole’s views. And he faced criticism from the press. The Barbados Globe hinted that Cole’s stated reason for withdrawal — Hinds’ amateurism — was not the full story. In other words, it was Hinds’ race rather than status that was the issue. Yet Cole’s apparent racism merely reflected Barbados society at the time: the ruling white minority excluded all other races from politics (through the inability to vote) and placed considerable obstacles (such as high interest rates) in the way of the their hopes of achieving financial prosperity. And, as Seecharan has pointed out, Cole “represented the more reactionary strand in white Barbadian racial attitudes,” because he came from the insecure second rung of white society, which perhaps felt more threatened by a perceived incomer like Hinds: “H.A. Cole belonged to the [commercial elite rather than plantation group]: he attended Harrison College and played for Pickwick. Therefore, the inflexibility of his response to the selection of Fitz Hinds bore evidence of all the social insecurities of the rising bourgeoisie: wealthy, but still dogged by their lower status in the white hierarchy with its assumption of superiority of the old planting families.” In the end, Cole did not tour. Hinds did, and was recognised as an amateur in England (for example, being listed as “Mr F. Hinds” on scorecards).

The West Indies team that toured England in 1900. Back row: M. M. Kerr, W. H. Mignon, G. V. Livingstone, P. I. Cox, W. C. Nock (manager); W. T. Burton, S. W. Sproston, C. A. Ollivierre. Middle row: W. Bowring, G. C. Learmond, R. S. A. Warner (captain), P. A. Goodman, L. S. Constantine. On ground: F. Hinds, J. Woods (Image: West Indies cricket history and cricket tours to England, 1900, 1906, 1923 (1923) by L. S. Smith)

Given all that led up to his selection though, it is perhaps unsurprising that Hinds struggled in England. Perhaps his presence on the tour was its own victory, but he would not have been helped by the conditions which were so alien to him and his team-mates. It took time to adjust to such matters as the slow pace of the outfield, the flat batting wickets, the different quality of light and the English weather. He managed to score two fifties, but only averaged 20 with the bat. He bowled little, only managing six wickets. Nevertheless, he did well as an occasional wicket-keeper (sharing the role with Constantine), for example taking five catches behind the wicket off the bowling of Burton against Norfolk. Perhaps his performances were a little disappointing, but writing in the 1901 Wisden, Pelham Warner judged that Hinds was “often useful in his peculiar style, and was a keen hard working cricketer.” S. W. Sproston, who took charge of many of the matches in the absence of the official captain, recalled in an interview printed in Cricket that August how, against Gloucestershire during an onslaught by Gilbert Jessop, Hinds “would not have a man out in the country [i.e. in the deep]. [Charlie] Townsend hit a ball which went past him towards the boundary, and two or three of the team were proceeding to go after it. But Hinds waved them back, calling out, ‘Leff all to me, I’m going for it’, and he went after it at a tremendous pace, leaving everybody else far behind.”

If Hinds had not set England alight, he remained a prominent cricketer afterwards. He continued to play for Spartan (and Cole and other white players continued to refuse to face him on the field) and became something of a popular hero. For example, when he was dismissed lbw for 43 against Pickwick in September 1900, the crowd noisily complained about the decision of the white umpire. A contemporary newspaper noted the danger of giving out a “favourite with the crowd”.

In January 1901, in the absence of any intercolonial competition that season, the white Barbadian A. B. St Hill took a team to Trinidad. The majority of St Hill’s team was from Barbados and included not only Hinds but several other black players (including two Barbadian professionals). The matches were judged to be first-class and therefore Hinds made his first-class debut when he played for A. B. St Hill’s XI against Trinidad in Port of Spain (ironically in a match that was played 12-a-side). He made an immediate impression, opening the bowling and taking ten for 36 in 19.1 overs (although this was a 12-a-side game, it is still recognised as first-class and usually included in lists of “ten wickets in an innings” even though eleven wickets fell in the innings). He took two wickets in the second innings but made less of an impression with the bat. In the second game between the teams, he bowled just two overs and again failed with the bat.

That September, Hinds played for Barbados for the first time, in the final of the Intercolonial Tournament (Barbados qualified automatically as the holders of the title) when he and Stephen Rudder became the first black players to represent Barbados. Presumably the realisation that if Hinds could represent the West Indies, he was good enough to play for Barbados (a point made by several English commentators in discussing the race-based selections of Barbados) led to his belated inclusion. And in the ultimate irony, one of their team-mates was none other than Hallam Cole, who must have overcome his objections by then. Hinds opened the batting in the first innings but achieved little with bat or ball. One letter to the Barbados Advocate before the tournament had suggested that Hinds was a “first-rate” wicket-keeper who should be played in that role, with someone else stepping in when he was bowling, but nothing came of this.

In January 1902, Hinds played for Barbados and a representative West Indies team (a “Combined Colonies” team that featured players from Barbados, Trinidad and British Guiana) against a touring English side led by R. A. Bennett. Presumably owing to injury, he did not bowl in any of the games. But opening the batting for Barbados in the first game, he scored 55 runs out of an opening partnership of 70, his first fifty at first-class level. During this innings he made quite an impression on the delighted crowd and bemused English team. Facing the slow leg-breaks of Ted Dillon, he switched hands after the ball had been delivered and tried to bat left-handed (in other words, what a modern spectator would call an attempted switch-hit) but seeing that it would not work, he turned his back to the bowler and hit the ball past the wicket-keeper. The Barbados Advocate recorded: “It was a novel stroke, and Bennett, who was behind the sticks, seemed rather uneasy when the ball was slashed past within a few inches of him. It was a stroke which required extreme agility and exactness, and we do not suppose any of our team beside Hinds would attempt it. It is unnecessary to say that the crowd cheered every such effort enthusiastically, and even the Englishmen were amused at the method of dealing with their attack.”

Despite this success, Hinds scored only 74 runs in four first-class innings across the three games (he also scored ten in a non-first-class game). After opening for Barbados, he batted down the order for the “Combined” team, which defeated Bennett’s team by an innings. When Barbados next played in the Intercolonial Tournament, in January 1904, Hinds retained his place and took a few wickets, but his only innings of note was an unbeaten 42 in the final (easily won by Trinidad). Yet he remained a certainty for Barbados and among the leading cricketers in the region. When Lord Brackley’s XI toured the West Indies in early 1905, Hinds played for both Barbados and in two representative matches for the West Indies. He played a few useful innings without reaching fifty, but took five for 41 in the second match between Brackley’s team and Barbados.

Those were Hinds’ final first-class appearances. In 12 matches, he scored 366 runs at 20.33 and took 29 wickets at 15.00. Yet if his record looks underwhelming, he was clearly respected enough to be a fixture in the Barbados team, playing every first-class match for the island between the tour of 1900 and the end of the 1904–05 season, and to be included in representative West Indies teams. And even more importantly, he was not just a beneficiary of parochial selection: he did not just play for West Indies teams chosen in Barbados, but was included by Trinidadian selectors when Brackley’s team toured in 1905. Therefore it was no reflection on his ability or his record that those matches marked the end of Hinds’ career in Barbados. He stopped playing because later in 1905, he emigrated to the United States.

Hinds continued to play cricket in the United States, although we have a record of only one game. In 1913, a privately organised (i.e. unofficial) Australian team toured North America. Many leading Australians, including the Test players Warren Bardsley and Charlie Macartney (and the former English Test player Jack Crawford) and the future Australian players Arthur Mailey and Herbie Collins, took part in the tour. One of the matches was played in Brooklyn, New York, a two-day game against the incongruously named “West Indian Coloured XI”, which had originally been called the “Cosmopolitan League” team. The game took place at Celtic Park, a ground run by the Irish-American Athletic Club, in Long Island, New York (it is wrongly listed as being in Brooklyn on CricketArchive, a mistake first made in Cricket in 1913). Hinds scored only one run in his only innings and did not bowl, injuring his foot in the field. He was replaced in the team by A. Marshall, and the Australians won by an innings.

If that was not quite the end of Hinds’ story, the final parts have remained a mystery until now because of a case of mistaken identity which caused his trail to go cold. The “Fitz Lily affair” was rediscovered by Brian Stoddart in the 1980s, and appeared in print in 1988, fully cited to contemporary newspapers and other publications (which was quite an achievement in the days before internet searches and digitised archives). Ten years later, the article was cited by Keith Sandiford in his Cricket Nurseries of Colonial Barbados (1998) but with one important difference. Sandiford identified Fitz Hinds as Delmont Cameron St Clair Hinds. This was subsequently accepted by all statistical authorities; Hinds is currently listed under that name by CricketArchive and ESPNcricinfo, and around this time, Wisden altered its record section so that credit for the ten for 36 against Trinidad in 1900–01 switched from “F. Hinds” (against whose name it had previously been listed) to “D. C. S. Hinds”.

Sandiford offered no evidence for this identification, nor have any of the people who have followed him in claiming that Fitz was really Delmont. There certainly was a man called Delmont Cameron St Clair Hinds; Barbados records show that he was born on 1 June 1880 and baptised in St Leonard’s Chapel in St Michael, Barbados, on 1 August 1880, the son of John Thomas Hinds (a coachman) and Jonna Hinds née Harewood, who lived on Westbury Road. However, there is no evidence to connect Delmont Hinds to Fitz Hinds. Quite how Sandiford (or whoever made the original link) settled on him as the most likely candidate is unclear. The identification, made at a time when records were hard to track down without a physical search, seems to have been somewhat haphazard. For example, there were other baptisms in Barbados around this time that could have been the cricketer, such as someone called Fitzhubert Alonzo Hinds, born in 1877 or Prince Arthur Alonzo Fitzgerald Hinds, born in 1899.

There are other issues around the claim that our cricketer was actually D. C. S. Hinds. For example, it is hard to see how the name Delmont Cameron St Clair could lead to a nickname of Fitz. Furthermore, all contemporary scorecards (rather than ones later transcribed onto computer databases like CricketArchive) list him as F. Hinds. While it could be argued that Caribbean newspapers might condescendingly use a nickname for a black cricketer, this does not quite hold true because Joseph Woods was known by the nickname of Float Woods but is listed on scorecards for the 1900 tour as “J. Woods”. A further problem with Hinds really being Delmont Cameron St Clair is that he was named on the list of incoming passengers to Southampton, alongside the other members of the cricket team, as “F. Hinds”, albeit with an erroneous age of 44. There are other reasons to doubt the identification. D. C. S. Hinds would have been 20 at the time of the 1900 tour, and only 19 when he joined Spartan. Given that he had been a net bowler before this, and had time to learn a trade as a painter, it seems unlikely that the actual Fitz Hinds could have been so young. A further problem is that D. C. S. Hinds has left no traces in any other records that can be traced online; this would be unsurprising if he had lived out his life in Barbados, but we know that Fitz Hinds emigrated to the United States, which kept copious records, almost all of which are readily available online. And in these, there is no record of a man called Delmont Cameron St Clair Hinds.

And it is these American records — unavailable to those first researchers in the 1980s and 1990s trying to find our man — that offer an alternative identity for Fitz Hinds. On 24 July 1905, a man called Fitzgerald Alexander Hinds arrived in New York from Barbados, on the S. S. Hubert. He was listed a 27-year old single man who gave his occupation as a painter. He had only $30 with him and was visiting a man called George McDermon, a Jamaican living in New York. This same man subsequently appears in multiple records, from census returns to certificates of naturalisation. While on other occasions he is listed as a porter, several records state that he was a painter. Could this be Fitz Hinds the cricketer? There are several elements that support such an idea: his birthplace of Barbados and his residence in New York (both of which we know applied to the cricketer; his address in 1913 — West 138th Street — was around nine miles from Celtic Park where we know Hinds played that year); his occupation; and the fact that “Fitzgerald” is a name far more likely to be rendered as “Fitz” than “Delmont Cameron St Clair”. It could also be argued that his age — a few years older than Delmont — makes it more likely that he could have achieved all that was recorded of the cricketer by 1900.

Fitzgerald Alexander seems a far more likely candidate for Fitz Hinds. Searches of the American records (which it should again be emphasised were impossible for earlier researchers) offer up no other realistic possibilities living in New York at the time. Incidentally, there is no obvious record of Fitzgerald’s baptism in Barbados, making it unlikely that he could have been found by anyone looking there in the 1980s or 1990s. And perhaps the clinching piece of corroboration that makes it likely that we have found the real Fitz Hinds is that the great-grandson of Fitzgerald Alexander Hinds was told by his father that the former had been a “world champion cricketer”.

Hinds’s signature from 1918

If we can be moderately confident that we have found the cricketer, the copious records taken in the United States allow us to fill in a lot of gaps about his life and learn what became of him once he emigrated. Fitzgerald Alexander Hinds was born on 17 September 1877 in Bridgetown, Barbados. He was the son of James Hinds (according to his death certificate) or Francis Hinds (according to his marriage certificate) Hinds and Annie Elkcott. The 1940 census reveals that he was educated until 8th grade (i.e. the age of 13 or 14); presumably it was after this that he began to learn his trade as a painter.

When Hinds arrived in the United States, he was already a father and might have had some complicated relationships. His first child, a son called Darcy, was born in 1902 but the identity of his mother is uncertain. Then in 1904, he had a daughter called Winifred with a woman called Maude Corbin (who might have been known as Maude Walcott). Hinds arrived in New York alone, but Maude soon followed (possibly a month later but definitely by 1906). In March 1907, they married in New York City; their second daughter was born the following month and in September 1907 their daughter Winifred (and Maude’s mother) came from Barbados to live with them. In total, the couple had ten children, from Winifred in 1904 to Maude in 1920.

A photograph of Harlem (showing Lenox Avenue from 135th Street) in 1939, very close to where Hinds and his family lived from their arrival in the United States until around 1935 (Image: From The New York Public Library)

Through the United States Census (as well as the New York Census) we can trace what happened to Hinds. The family lived in Harlem, Manhattan, for at least thirty years after their arrival in the United States. The area in which he lived gave birth after the First World War to what became known as the “Harlem Renaissance” — the intellectual and cultural explosion of art, writing and music from African Americans based in Harlem. The Hinds family lived close to the areas that became the centre of the movement. They clearly had no desire to return to Barbados because in 1925 Hinds and his wife became naturalised citizens of the United States.

However, Hinds’ occupation was prosaic. In 1910, he worked as a porter in a department store, but by 1915 he was working as an elevator operator. After this, he seems to have resumed his main trade as a painter, which was his recorded occupation (specifically a house painter) in 1920 and 1925. Perhaps this suggests a period of prosperity, where he could take on less menial jobs. But it did not last. Perhaps the Great Depression played a part, but by 1930 Hinds was again working as a porter, initially for a gas company. By 1940 he was based in an office building, earning a salary of $1,350. Sometime after 1935, the family relocated to the Bronx. It is hard to gauge what life was like for them. They always rented their accommodation and often took in lodgers. But the family stayed close: even in 1940, when all the children were adults, many of them (even the ones who were married) lived at home, as did several of the Hinds grandchildren and Maude’s mother.

Maude died at the family home in 1941 at the age of 53; the cause of death was “Broncho Pneumonia, Diabetes Millitus and Bronchial Asthma”. Fitz died on 30 December 1948 at Lincoln Hospital. He was still working as a porter at the age of 72; no cause of death is recorded on the transcribed online indexes.

The grave of Hinds and his wife, located in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York (Image: Kenny Hughes (a.k.a. Kenneth G. Hughes) via Find a Grave)

In the 75 years since Hinds’ death, no-one outside the family realised that he was once a famous cricketer. Even though the “Fitz Lily affair” was rediscovered and retold, becoming a topic of some importance in the academic study of cricket in the Caribbean, no-one was quite sure what had happened to the man at the centre, the man who had inadvertently affected the first tour of England by a West Indies team and forced the cricket establishment in Barbados to take a long look at its attitudes towards race and class. While his cricketing skill is almost secondary to the story, it should not be forgotten that — even if not entirely reflected in statistics — Hinds was one of the leading cricketers in the West Indies at the beginning of the twentieth century; he was so good that Barbados abandoned its “white only” policy in the Intercolonial Tournament. He even, if we consider that one fleeting reference to an attempted switch-hit and Warner’s comment about “his peculiar style”, played in a way that might not be out of place today, happy to improvise and break convention on the field as well as off.

In short, such a cricketer should be remembered rather more than he is. And at the very least, we should make sure that we have identified the right man in order to give him due recognition.

Politics, Selection and Mistaken Identity: The Life of Errol Hunte

Errol Hunte in Australia in 1930 (Image: National Library of Australia)

Early West Indian Test cricketers are poorly served by historians; many are little more than a name on a scorecard. Such a fate is perhaps inevitable for almost anyone who played so long ago unless they were from England or Australia, but even so there are many cases from the Caribbean in the period before the Second World War. One of the more extreme is the Trinidadian wicket-keeper Errol Hunte. He played three Tests in 1930 and toured Australia in 1930–31, but his Wisden obituary was just a few bland lines. To measure it in a different way, his Wikipedia article is one sentence at the time of writing. His biggest claim to notability was that for many years, Wisden confused him with another player and split his Test appearances with the unrelated R. L. Hunte of British Guiana, a simple case of mis-transcribing “Errol” as “R. L.”, an error uncorrected until 1967. Gideon Haigh wrote about this mistake for ESPNcricinfo in 2006, but even he had little to say about the player himself. Perhaps it is time to redress the balance a little.

Errol Ashton Clairmonte Hunte was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, on 3 October 1905. Almost nothing is known about his early life except that in the 1920s he played for Maple Cricket Club in Trinidad. In Beyond a Boundary (1963), C. L. R. James — who also played for Maple — C. L. R. James described it as the club of “the brown-skinned middle class”, which might give some clues about Hunte’s background. Hunte’s first appearance in the record books came when he played for North Trinidad against South Trinidad in 1925; two years later, he played for the North against the South once again, this time in the Beaumont Cup, when one of his team-mates was C. L. R. James, and then again in 1928. He did not distinguish himself with the bat in any of these matches, although he was playing alongside some of the biggest names in West Indian cricket (there is no indication of whether he kept wicket in these games, but it is most likely that he did). In May that year, when some of those names were taking part in a very undistinguished tour of England that incorporated the first Test matches played by the West Indies, Hunte and his fellow Trinidadians Edwin St Hill and Ben Sealey visited New York as part of a West Indian cricket team. The sailing record provides some of the only information we have about Hunte: that he was a teacher; that he was unmarried and lived with his father, T. W. Hunte, in Belmont; and that he was 5 feet 11 inches tall.

The following January, Hunte made his first-class debut for Trinidad, playing as the wicket-keeper against Barbados and British Guiana as his team easily won the Intercolonial Tournament at home. But Hunte’s highest score in three innings was 26, and his selection reflected the somewhat confused nature of Trinidad’s team in this period following the mysterious withdrawal of the team’s regular wicket-keeper George Dewhurst from first-class cricket. Hunte was one of several wicket-keepers tried in this period. If his batting made no impact, he must have impressed to some extent with the wicket-keeping gloves. He retained his place when the team defended their title later in the year in British Guiana (playing once more for North Trinidad in the meantime) but again achieved little of note (batting at number ten in both innings, having appeared in the middle order in his first two matches).

Embed from Getty Images

The West Indies team for the first Test in 1930.  Back row: (Unknown), (Unknown), Edwin St Hill, Clifford Roach, Frank De Caires, Leslie Walcott, Errol Hunte, (Unknown). Front row: James Neblett, George Headley, Learie Constantine, Teddy Hoad (captain), Cyril Browne, Derek Sealey, Herman Griffith.

But either his wicket-keeping shone, or he had batting success in local Trinidad cricket because not only did the Trinidad selectors stick with him, he was chosen as the wicket-keeper for the West Indies in the opening Test match for England’s tour in 1930. Nor did his selection owe anything to regional politics because his debut was in Barbados, meaning that the Barbados selectors must have judged him to be the best wicket-keeper. In a drawn game, he batted at number eleven and scored 10 not out and 1. However, a gossipy article a few weeks later in Trinidad’s Sporting Chronicle suggested that he had not impressed the cricket authorities in Barbados, an opinion echoed in The Cricketer’s review of the tour published in England.

When the series moved to Trinidad, Hunte became (presumably inadvertently) caught up in a mysterious controversy involving the former Trinidad captain and wicket-keeper George Dewhurst, who had withdrawn from the West Indies team that toured England in 1928 over selection issues and not played for the island since. However, with the visit of the English team, there were moves afoot not only for Dewhurst to return to the Trinidad team, but also to captain the West Indies for the Trinidad Test. As was normal practice, the MCC team played two matches against Trinidad before the Test match. In the first, the home team were captained by Nelson Betancourt, a 42-year-old who had played intermittently for Trinidad since 1905 and had a very undistinguished playing record. The wicket-keeper for this match was Hunte, who batted at number eleven in the first innings, scoring 12 not out, and 20 not out (when he cannot have batted last, but his position is not known) in the second as Trinidad won by 102 runs. For the second game against the MCC, Hunte was replaced by Dewhurst, who also captained the team in what was regarded by some elements of the press as a trial to see who should captain the Test team. Several newspapers predicted that he would be named as captain, but when the team was announced, Betancourt was captain and Hunte had been retained as wicket-keeper.

Given his lack of batting form, it is remarkable that Hunte was asked to open he batting alongside Clifford Roach, and even more remarkable that he scored 58, his maiden first-class fifty. His half century came in 102 balls with eight fours, and he shared a second-wicket stand of 89 with Wilton St Hill (after Roach was dismissed without a run scored). Wisden noted that he and St Hill “played steadily”. He scored 30 in the second innings, sharing an opening partnership of 57 with St Hill. West Indies lost that game but Hunte, having impressed in the role and with his batting, was retained as wicket-keeper when the teams travelled to British Guiana. He once again opened the batting and this time shared an opening partnership of 144 with Roach; he scored a dogged 53, reaching his half century from 195 deliveries. Nevertheless, he had a great deal of luck; Wisden observed: “MCC’s [England’s] fielding was badly at fault when West Indies opened their first innings with a stand of 144, Hunte being missed four times.” Hunte was first out, and Roach went on to a double century. Hunte scored 14 in the second innings and West Indies won by 289 runs.

Hunte did not retain his place for the final Test, played in Jamaica, making way for the local wicket-keeper Ivan Barrow. But he had impressed some critics. The review of the tour in The Cricketer stated of Hunte: “An ungainly wicket-keeper, but active and effective. Kept very moderately in Barbados, but very well in Trinidad. Proved himself a most useful opening batsman, having a very stubborn defence. He can also hit the ball hard. Ugly and ungainly in this department too.” In Trinidad, the Sporting Chronicle viewed him as an “able” keeper who showed “high promise” with the bat. But Wisden became very confused; Hunte was listed in the averages as two separate people. His debut was listed as a cricketer called “E. Hunte” but the other two appearances were attributed to “R. L. Hunte”, and this mistake was perpetuated in later editions of the almanack, which recorded one Test appearance by E. Hunte and two by R. L. Hunte. The reasons are not hard to find: Wisden seemingly had no correspondent on hand and, compared to The Cricketer, displayed patch knowledge of West Indian cricket. As there was a cricketer in the Caribbean called R. L. Hunte (Ronald Hunte, who had a twenty-year career with British Guiana), the confusion of the initials with the name “Errol” is understandable but inexcusable in a publication concerned with statistical accuracy. The mistake was not corrected until the 1967 edition of Wisden.

Left to right: George Headley, Derek Sealy and Errol Hunte in Australia in November 1930 (Image: National Library of Australia)

Given his success with bat and gloves, it was inevitable that Hunte would be selected for a tour of Australia in 1930–31. He and Barrow were the main wicket-keepers (although Derek Sealy kept wicket later in his career and could have filled in), but the suspicion was that Hunte was chosen as much for his batting as wicket-keeping; for example, the Daily Gleaner in Jamaica suggested: “Anyhow Hunte as a good opening batsmen may be played more in that capacity than for his keeping qualities.” If so, he was picked based on a very limited record. Furthermore, there were some doubts about his health going into the tour; the Gleaner reported that he had been “a trifle seedy”. Yet he must have recovered because in later years, the doctor responsible for the health of the team on tour told Andy Ganteaume that Hunte was “the finest specimen of a man” he had seen.

The Australian press showed considerable interest in the team, particularly the black players. A tour preview in the Adelaide Advertiser, written by Thomas D. Lord of Trinidad, gave a brief summary of Hunte’s career and described him as an excellent wicket-keeper and worthy successor to Dewhurst. It also stated of his batting: “He is endowed with great patience and concentrates on a sound defence but when once he sees the ball well, he hits hard.” Another oddity about Hunte’s tour was that he was advertised in Sydney’s Daily Pictorial as an aspiring author: “Hunte has a remarkable flair for literature, and he has written a vivid human drama specially for the “Sunday Pictorial.” The story duly appeared on 30 November, called “The Soul’s Awakening”

Whatever the literary merits of the story, Hunte’s tour on the field was undistinguished. His highest score in five first-class matches was 29 and although he was given several chances to establish himself, Barrow was the favoured wicket-keeper throughout the tour and played all five Test matches. The Cricketer review of the tour noted that “wicketkeeping [was] a weak-point for some time with the West Indies” and that Barrow had been played in the Tests. However, during the tour an article in the Trinidad Sporting Chronicle suggested that Hunte had been left out following an incident in a match against Queensland. According to the article, Hunte “with great show and confidence appealed for a catch” at the wicket when Victor Goodwin was batting. The appeal was turned down and Hunte “proceeded to make demonstration in seeming disgust” and threw the ball away. The article suggested that “on account of this and other similar reasons”, Hunte was omitted from the Tests. The newspaper concluded that “Hunte should not have taken this sort of local Savannah Cricket habit to Australia” and felt “pretty sure that his inability to accept decisions against his appeals in the proper manner and his all too demonstrative yet not always safe methods when performing behind the wicket have been responsible for the small number of his appearances in the big matches.”

Hunte batting in the nets at Sydney in 1930 (Image: National Library of Australia)

This account was denied by the batter Frank Martin when he returned home to Jamaica. In a speech at a dinner to honour the Jamaican cricketers who played in Australia, Martin was critical of the Sporting Chronicle for printing the article and mildly rebuked the Gleaner for reprinting it. He said that he was sure “that the intelligent public, knowing the source from which that article came, would not, or did not place any credence to it.” He called Hunte “a fine fellow” and a “sportsman”, for whom such actions would be “quite foreign”. He said that no such incident took place and that the story was “only a crude way of excusing the exclusion of Mr Hunte [who] was excluded from the team because Mr Barrow proved himself a very good keeper.” The endorsement of Hunte received a warm reception from his Jamaican audience.

Even if there was no truth in the rumours, Hunte never played for the West Indies again. His name was discussed prior to the 1933 tour of England, but a writer for the Port of Spain Gazette said: “I understand that there is prejudice against Errol Hunte. In fact I know there is. The quicker the selectors put this behind their backs and think of nothing else but the success of the side the better for them. For Hunte is not only a proper wicket-keeper but a good batsman with a fair experience and where so much is uncertain it is best that the side should have as many batsmen as possible.” As was the case in 1930 and 1930–31, there is a definite sense that Hunte’s selection was tied up in matters beyond the field, even if we cannot be too sure what they were. But when he failed in a trial match for the tour, he was omitted from the team. An account in The Cricketer stated: “Hunte and De Caires both visited Australia and both failed as batsmen in the trials; indeed, C. L. C. Bourne kept wicket in the former’s place and he perhaps never had more than an outside chance.”

Hunte retained his place as Trinidad’s wicket-keeper for the 1932 and 1934 Intercolonial Tournaments (there was no tournament in 1933, with games instead arranged to inform selection for the 1933 tour of England). His highest score in these games was 56, and after scores of 2 and 2 opening the batting against Barbados in 1934, his first-class career was over (although he captained South Trinidad in the Beaumont Cup as late as 1937). His role as Trinidad’s wicket-keeper was taken by Allman Agard.

Nevertheless it is likely that Hunte had chosen to make himself unavailable for financial or career reasons. By 1930, he no longer worked as a teacher but was instead a clerical assistant at a magistrate’s court in Princes Town and Moruga, on an annual salary of £110. And it seems that some time in the early 1930s, Hunte married (only the first names of his wife are known — Olive Leona — and we know that she was born in 1906) and in 1934 he became the father to twin girls. A son (1940) and another daughter (1942) came later. Perhaps he chose to concentrate on his career in order to support his family.

He certainly remained a civil servant in later years, and travelled extensively. For example, he visited New York (with his wife) in 1949. But he and his family also spent some time in England. In 1954, he spent time in England working for the British Council in Liverpool, accompanied by his wife and four children; his eldest daughters were working as a civil servant and as a librarian. Hunte stayed for several months, living in London. In 1960, he spent six months in England, working as a civil servant at the Colonial Office in London. And in between these extended visits, he also spent time as a delegate at the conference on Local Government at the University College of the West Indies in 1957.

But he was not done with cricket and worked as a government coach in a scheme organised by the Ministry of Education and Culture. He became head of the Community Development Department and worked alongside several former West Indies cricketers included Ellis Achong and Andy Ganteaume. In his 2007 autobiography, the latter wrote: “Errol was one of the finest gentlemen one could ever meet. Errol was an exceptional individual. He had a very pleasant manner, a lovely sense of humour, was also a good billiards player and an outstanding card player who was always able to avoid any unpleasant exchange with any other player.”

Hunte died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1967, leaving an estate worth £1,565. His final address was D8 Empire Flats, St Vincent Street, Port of Spain. His probate was handled in England two years later. He had a brief obituary in Wisden, which even if it had corrected his misidentification as R. L. Hunte, made another mistake, saying that he played for British Guiana (again, probably a confusion with the real R. L Hunte). It called him a “good opening batsman”. Hunte’s obituary in The Cricketer went the other way, and called him (perhaps a little generously) “an outstanding wicket-keeper in intercolonial cricket”. But as was the case with so many of Hunte’s contemporaries in the West Indies teams, there was little interest in going any further. Yet in many ways, his cricketing career and his life in general are perfect illustrations of West Indies cricket in the early 1930s: a combination of good fortune, the effects of politics (through no fault of his own) and — despite the obstacles — some very good cricket before real life intruded.

“Too daring for the grey-beards?”: The Mental Health of Harold Gimblett

Harold Gimblett in 1936 (Image: Wikipedia)

The incredible first-class debut of Harold Gimblett, the 20-year-old son of a farmer, for Somerset in 1935 catapulted him to fame from the very start of his career. His 63-minute century against Essex was one of the most spectacular debuts by any player and suggested that a promising career was beginning. When Gimblett was forced to retire 19 years later owing to a severe mental health condition which required his admission to hospital, he had largely fulfilled that promise. Over those years, he was to prove more than useful. He became — and remains, almost seventy years after his retirement — Somerset’s leading run-scorer in first-class cricket. He was an entertainer much loved by the county’s supporters and played many great innings. And yet underneath the success, there was tension and bitterness, to which there were two contributing factors. The first was the nature of cricket in the years around the Second World War: a Somerset Committee which handled all professionals with a brutal lack of sympathy, empathy or understanding, and a sport riven by deliberate class distinction in which the amateurs were on top, and professionals were treated as menial hired hands (a distinction which was often harsher at counties like Somerset which had a greater proportion of amateurs in the team). But the second factor was Gimblett’s own lifelong struggle with mental health.

Most of what we know about this comes from Gimblett’s own account, provided in a series of tape recordings intended for the ears of David Foot, with whom he planned to collaborate on an autobiography. The project never got off the ground before Gimblett’s suicide in 1978, but Foot turned the searingly, painfully honest recordings into a 1982 biography Harold Gimblett: Tormented Genius of Cricket. There had never quite been anything like it before, owing to the fact that Gimblett did not intend his words to be published when he spoke them (but he gave permission, as did his widow after his death, for Foot to use them) and so they did not have the usual filter applied by sporting stars in writing their autobiographies. There is no parallel account of the life of a cricketer in the period around the Second World War. And yet his words find an echo in the experiences of modern players whose mental health suffers under the unrelenting pressure of professional and international sport. This can be seen most clearly in his memories of his Test debut for England in the first match of a series against India in 1936, in which he dreaded having to play. But an unbeaten, match-winning 67 in the second innings (the highest score of the game) provided him with another fairly-tale debut and meant that he retained his place. This proved something of a turning point for him.

At the time, the England selectors were looking around for new players to refresh the team and replace some veterans after a string of poor results. For the second Test, Gimblett’s opening partner was the debutant Arthur Fagg, who like him was only 21 years old. In a high-scoring game, Gimblett made just nine runs out of England’s 571 for eight declared. He also missed a catch when India batted and was dropped from the team for the third Test. While somewhat relieved to escape from the pressure, he was affected for the rest of the summer by what he perceived as his failure, which continued to weigh on his mind and impacted on his form. After his Somerset debut the previous summer, he had similarly struggled for consistency in the aftermath, but never questioned his own methods. Nor had he particularly clashed with the Somerset authorities. But something seemed to change (if we can believe his own account) now that he was an international cricketer. The Somerset Committee attempted to force him to temper his aggression, but he was not willing to compromise, even when he form had fallen away. For the rest of the season, he struggled with the hook shot, which he had always played successfully, and sought out Herbert Sutcliffe, an acknowledged expert at the shot, for technical advice. An unsympathetic Somerset Committee simply told him to stop playing the shot, which he refused to do. He also clashed with his captain after one game in which he hit a full toss for six in the last over of a day’s play; he was told that he would be dropped if he ever took such a risk again.

The result of all this was another loss of form. In his first five matches of the season, Gimblett had scored 623 runs with three centuries, at an average of 103.83. By the time of his selection for England, he had scored 1,041 runs in 12 matches at 57.83. In the remainder of the season, he managed just 605 runs at 18.91. His final record for 1936 was 1,608 first-class runs at an average of 32.81; respectable but far short of what seemed possible at the start. His temperament in big matches and his slip fielding were also questioned by Wisden, which, as it had done after his debut, counselled a more careful approach. But how much had the scrutiny of the opening weeks of the season, and the pressure — and what would probably today be termed as anxiety — before his England debut affected him? The effects lasted into the following two seasons, when Gimblett struggled to live up to the potential identified in the press. Others overtook him in the race for England places, and he seemed unsure of the best way to bat. He was heavily criticised in 1937 for his overly aggressive batting and was briefly dropped down the order. Yet he was outwardly unconcerned and stubbornly maintained his approach; sometimes he seemed overconfident and played in deliberately unorthodox fashion. Again, this is perhaps less an indication of arrogance and more a sign that all was not well. He still managed 1,500 runs that summer, at an average just over thirty, but fell away in 1938, and his average dropped to 27. Moreover, he was often unfit, battling “aches and pains”.

Gimblett at his wedding to Ria Burgess in 1938 (Image: Harold Gimblett: Tormented Genius of Cricket (1982) by David Foot)

Gimblett finally began to recover his batting skill in 1939, and made a distinct advance. Perhaps this was early a result of his previous experiences, or perhaps it arose from a change in his personal life. In December 1938, he had married Marguerita (Rita) Burgess, whom he had known for some years. They eventually had a son, Lawrence. Whatever the cause, Gimblett made an excellent start to the 1939, similar to that of 1936, and scored 905 runs in his first seven games. Such form resulted in a recall to the England team for the first Test against the West Indies team that toured during the season. Perhaps unfortunately, it was once more played at Lord’s, a ground that often made him uncomfortable owing to what he perceived as extreme snobbery and social prejudice. In the first innings, he was bowled by John Cameron for 22 when he lost sight of a flighted delivery; in the second, he hit his first two deliveries, bowled by Leslie Hylton, for four and six, as England chased a target against the clock. But in looking to score quickly, he was bowled by Manny Martindale. Unlike during his previous Test appearances, his fielding was singled out for praise in Wisden; he took one spectacular catch to dismiss Ken Weekes, for which he was congratulated by the new batter, Learie Constantine. But he had not done quite enough and was dropped for the final time, having played only three Tests for England. Although it is hard to be certain, some of his team-mates suspected in later years that, whenever there was a chance that he might come back into England selection, such as before a touring team was chosen, he deliberately batted poorly so that he would not be picked. Nevertheless, in 1939 he managed to maintain his form and finished the season with 1,922 runs at 40.89.

The outbreak of war in 1939 brought a pause in Gimblett’s career, and he found the next few years difficult. He volunteered for the Air Force, but for reasons that are not quite clear was instead allocated to the Fire Service where his duties involved dealing with the aftermath of bombing raids. Foot notes that some of Gimblett’s team-mates thought that guilt from not seeing active service affected him after the war. But he was equally affected by his experiences as a fireman, especially when some of his colleagues were killed in an air raid, and he possibly suffered depression from having to deal with the destruction. Foot had received information that “his dormitory locker was full of pills.”

When county cricket resumed, Gimblett did better than ever. Somerset were surprisingly good in 1946 and finished fourth in the County Championship; Gimblett was a key player, averaging almost fifty. More circumspect than he had been, he still was capable of powerful shots but was less reckless. He scored his first double-century when he hit 231 against Middlesex in 320 minutes (32 fours, 1 six). If there was a slightly drop-off in 1947, the team leaned almost entirely on his runs in 1948. Against Sussex that summer, he scored 310 (465 minutes, 37 fours, 2 sixes), the highest innings by a Somerset player, surpassing the 52-year-old record set by the amateur Lionel Palairet, who scored 292 in 1896. However, the Somerset Committee refused to recognise the achievement. Gimblett said: “Arthur Wellard went to see the secretary, Brigadier Lancaster. ‘Harold’s just made 300. Will you allow a collection around the ground for him?’ The answer was prompt: “He’s paid to score 300. There will be no collection.’ I think that was when I first decided my career with Somerset was going to end. I was deeply hurt.” He and his team-mates suspected that the Somerset hierarchy were displeased that a professional had beaten the record of a famous and revered amateur from the past. But that was not his only spectacular achievement in 1948: against Glamorgan, he scored 70 which included six sixes in 13 balls from Len Muncer.

Somerset in 1946, illustrated on a benefit leaflet for F. S. Lee (Image: Harold Gimblett: Tormented Genius of Cricket (1982) by David Foot)

This immediate post-war period was perhaps Gimblett’s peak as a cricketer. He was adored by the Somerset crowds and enjoyed their adulation. But this brought its own internal pressures. While he struggled with the scrutiny and expectations of playing for England, and although he did not like journalists or the press in general, he enjoyed hogging the headlines for Somerset and was sometimes jealous of team-mates who usurped the attention. He hated to fail, and team-mates described how he would throw his bat around the dressing room if he was dismissed cheaply; they knew to keep away. Nor did they criticise him, because he did not respond well; in fairness, he did not especially enjoy praise either. Yet it left him with a reputation as something of a prima donna, not least because his reactions could be unpredictable. Foot tells several stories: how he once refused a drink from a Somerset member after he scored a large century, and had to be persuaded to accept; how he angrily shouted at Lancashire members who were critical of an umpiring decision that went against their team: “Why don’t you go back to the bloody mills and do an honest day’s work”; how when he was dismissed early in an innings played at Lord’s, and an MCC member complained “I’m sorry you are out, Gimblett; I’ve come a long way to watch you bat”, he stopped and replied: “You ought to have bloody well stayed at home.”

Nor was he a particularly good team-mate. Although he got on well with the other professionals, he was not especially interested in their success. He did not usually watch them bat, and only rarely offered technical advice despite being knowledgable about such matters. And he did not always consider the interests of his team while he was batting; he sometimes played how he wanted to play rather than as the situation demanded and sometimes was prone to play deliberately poorly if he knew selectors were watching. One amateur team-mate, according to Foot, suggested that if he was hit by a short ball (although he was generally very skilled against bouncers and fast bowling), he sometimes surrendered his wicket shortly after. Nevertheless, when the mood took him, he was a good team man, getting his head down and seeing off the new ball, or battling through difficult situations when Somerset were in trouble. Yet he never wanted responsibility and captaincy held no appeal for him.

Perhaps more importantly, Gimblett rarely got along with the amateurs in the team and could be difficult for the captain to deal with, particularly at a time when Somerset had a succession of short-lived captains who struggled to establish themselves. In fact, he had a problem with authority, refusing the demands of the Somerset Committee to drop the hook shot; he lacked deference even towards figures as distinguished as Pelham Warner. As the writer (and former Somerset player) R. C. Robertson-Glasgow put it: “Someone remarked that perhaps he is too daring for the grey-beards. My own view is that he is also too daring for the majority of the black-beards, brown beards and the all-beards, who sit in judgement on batsmen; in short, too daring for those who have never known what it is to dare in cricket.” The editor of a local newspaper who went to school with Gimblett called him an “infuriating enigma”. John Daniell, a hugely influential figure at Somerset for much of Gimblett’s time there, was baffled by the opener. He was often heard muttering: “That bloody Gimblett”. The latter in turn never forgave Daniell for rejecting him as a Somerset player before he made his famous debut (when he was chosen, just as an unsuccessful two-week trial was coming to an end, largely because no-one else was available).

Off the field, Gimblett had a reputation as a hypochondriac; he complained of aches and pains and suffered from migraines. He frequently visited doctors and was known, particularly after his mental health struggles became serious, for always having bottles of painkillers in his kit. He often kept to himself and was very introverted. Yet his rebelliousness was admired by his fellow professionals, who often conformed to get ahead.

Gimblett set another record in 1949, when he reached 2,000 first-class runs in the season for the first time; his 2,063 runs was the highest in a season for Somerset (beating Frank Lee’s 2,019 runs in 1938). During another solid season in 1950, Gimblett made runs for Somerset against the touring West Indies team. As a result, when Len Hutton withdrew from the England Test side, Gimblett was chosen to replace him. However, Gimblett developed a painful carbuncle on his neck and therefore was unable (or perhaps unwilling) to play; there were suggestions that the carbuncle might have arisen through the stress of his selection.

During the 1950–51 season, a “Commonwealth XI” toured India and what was then known as Ceylon; this took place at the same time that an England team toured Australia. Gimblett was chosen in the Commonwealth team and did reasonably well on the field. But he did not enjoy the tour: “It was a bad time for me — I had no energy, no spark, no conversation. I became very withdrawn. At first I wondered whether I’d picked up a bug. But it was purely mental.” He also struggled with Indian food and climate; he lost weight and came home looking very thin. Foot concluded that “Gimblett was temperamentally unsuited to touring”. But even this might be harsh; the experience he describes sounds very similar to the accounts of more recent England players, like Jonathan Trott and Marcus Trescothick, who hated the life of a touring cricketer, which exacerbated their symptoms of anxiety.

Gimblett batting at Bristol against Gloucestershire in 1953 (Image: Harold Gimblett: Tormented Genius of Cricket (1982) by David Foot)

The after-effects of the tour lingered into the 1951 season and Gimblett took a complete break in July, after doctors told him that he was “run down”. When he returned in August, he scored three centuries. The instability of the Somerset team cannot have helped; both the captain and Gimblett’s opening partner changed with bewildering frequency in this period. During his benefit season of 1952, he scored 2,000 runs again. At the end of the season, he took his family on a six-month trip to Rhodesia after being invited there in order to coach and play a little cricket. He was tempted to stay but chose to honour his Somerset contract and, according to Foot, “the pending political mood [in Rhodesia] bothered him.” Although he scored heavily again in 1953, there were suggestions that he had stopped enjoying the game and rumours of his imminent retirement, or his need for psychiatric treatment, circulated. Although he continued to bat well, Foot suggested that he was “inclined to look an old man” even though he was only 38. Gimblett himself said: “I couldn’t take much more. I was taking sleeping pills to make me sleep and others to wake me up. By the end of 1953, the world was closing in on me. I couldn’t offer any reason why and I don’t think the medical profession knew, either. There were months of the past season that I couldn’t remember at all.”

After struggling over Christmas 1953, Gimblett was admitted to the mental hospital Tone Vale (near Taunton) and had electro-convulsant therapy twice a week. He was a patient for sixteen weeks before rejoining Somerset for the 1954 season. He struggled through pre-season and played the first game although he wanted to come off mid-innings. When he was out for 29, he returned to the dressing room and had what Foot called “a bitter little monologue”, while Gimblett said that “I wanted to get it all out of the system in one go.” There were suggestions that he was reported to the Secretary; in the next game, he scored a duck against Yorkshire and when he returned to the dressing room, said that he couldn’t take any more. He left the ground mid-game; he batted in the second innings but was told by the captain to take some time off. He never played for Somerset again; he was soon a patient at Tone Vale once more. When he returned to the county ground later in the season to sit in the scorers’ box, he was ordered to leave.

The rejection, and lack of sympathy from Somerset throughout his career, left Gimblett bitter. Although he served on the Somerset Committee in the 1960s, and was heavily involved in fund-raising, he never quite forgave the county. These feelings were doubtless exacerbated by his mental health struggles, which continued for the rest of his life. He never knew the cause because he never received a diagnosis. But his problems were by no means limited to his cricketing experiences.

At the time of his enforced retirement, Gimblett had amassed an excellent record. He had scored 23,007 first-class runs at 36.17 (and took 41 wickets at 51.80); of those, 21,142 were for Somerset and even today, almost seventy years after his retirement, he remains Somerset’s leading run-scorer in first-class cricket, just ahead of Marcus Trescothick. In among those runs, he scored fifty first-class centuries; all but one came for Somerset, but he is second to Trescothick in the list of leading century scorers for the county. His innings of 310 remains the fifth highest score for Somerset; it was surpassed by Viv Richards in 1985 (and the record-holder is currently Justin Langer with 341). In his three Test matches, he scored 129 runs at 32.25.

After leaving Somerset, Gimblett briefly played professionally for Ebbw Vale Cricket Club, having struggled to find other employment. He also began to work at a steel works in South Wales as a safety inspector. He struggled with his mental health and the job in the steel works — and the unions — and at one point drove back to Somerset alone for a day, not returning home until the night. In his second season at Ebbw Vale, he left the steel works and took a job working on a farm but his schedule left him too tired to play for the club mid-week and his contract was terminated by mutual agreement. He later took a job at R. J. O. Meyer’s Millfield School as the head coach, with half an eye on returning to play for Somerset. Meyer was supportive but the Committee did not want Gimblett to return. In any case, he worked for twenty years at Millfield, performing various roles (including running the sports shop) and playing plenty of informal cricket. When Meyer retired, Gimblett’s relationship with the school became fractious and he began to hate his job. At one point, recognising that he was struggling, he applied to another school before changing his mind. He once more was treated in a mental hospital with electro-convulsant therapy. He retired on medical advice, not least as he was struggling with various physical ailments (some of which required surgery in later years).

In his final years became more and more reclusive, and by the end of his life actively disliked cricket. Even his wife, to whom he remained close, told Foot that she never entirely understood him. In his turn, Gimblett felt that he had been unkind to her early in their relationship, and regretted it. In March 1978, Gimblett took an overdose and was discovered next morning by his wife. Foot summarised this unhappy ending: “The tragedy is that he was able to share too little of the joy and sheer pleasure he brought to the game of cricket.” But this seems too simple of a conclusion for a complicated man who clearly had endured serious mental health problems which would have been beyond the comprehension of his contemporaries, little understood by the medical establishment of the time and even when Foot was writing in 1982 remained a source of shame and stigmatisation. Perhaps in the modern world — and even in modern cricket — Gimblett might have received better treatment (in both the medical and professional sense).

We cannot do justice to such a complex issue — nor, in fairness, to a complex life — here. But perhaps we can consider his standing as a cricketer. A sympathetic obituary in Wisden, although it did not mention his cause of death, summarised his career very effectively: “People sometimes talk as if after [his debut] he was a disappointment. In fact his one set-back, apart from being overlooked by the selectors, was when in 1938, probably listening to the advice of grave critics, he attempted more cautious methods and his average dropped to 27. But can one call disappointing a man who between 1936 and his retirement in 1953 never failed to get his 1,000 runs, who in his career scored over 23,000, more than any other Somerset player, and fifty centuries, the highest 310 against Sussex at Eastbourne in 1948, and whose average for his career was over 36?”

The Astonishing Debuts of Harold Gimblett

Harold Gimblett in 1936 (Image: Wikipedia)

It was the absolute exemplar of a fairy tale debut. Harold Gimblett was a man coming to the end of an unsuccessful two-week trial, in whom his captain had no faith, when he was picked to play for Somerset against Essex in May 1935. He played largely because no-one else was available and the publishers of the printed scorecards available at all games at this time did not even know his initials. He came to the wicket at number eight, when the scorecard read 106 for six. Just over an hour later, he reached one of the most spectacular debut centuries in the history of first-class cricket. Perhaps inevitably, the rest of Gimblett’s playing career, as successful as it undoubtedly was (and Foot, in 1982, called Gimblett the “greatest batsman Somerset have ever produced”), never quite lived up to that debut; sport is full of similar stories of spectacular beginnings that peter out. But in Gimblett’s case, the reasons are far from typical and the course of his cricketing life provides one of the earliest-documented cases of the devastating effect that cricket can have on mental health.

Gimblett’s story was once well-known, and was told astonishingly well by David Foot in his 1982 biography Harold Gimblett: Tormented Genius of Cricket. The book was enormously influential and became the standard work on Gimblett. The main reason for this — other than some excellent, and unusually restrained, writing from Foot — was that it was based on extensive tape recordings made by Gimblett before his death in 1978, which were intended to form the basis of a book which he hoped to write about his life with Foot’s help. Searingly and painfully honest, and never sanitised or polished for his final audience, Gimblett’s words — frequently given in full by Foot — give an almost unique insight into the thoughts of a professional cricketer in the 1930s. Of course, the usual caveats apply, not least that Gimblett was discussing events from forty years previously and his recollections were doubtless skewed by his mental health struggles during his playing days. But even so, it is a unique book and no biography/autobiography about a pre-war cricketer really compares to it for its honesty. As John Arlott wrote in his foreword, “There has never been a cricket book quite like this”.

However, the format has become more familiar since Tormented Genius was published; many recent cricketers have opened up about their own struggles after another Somerset opener, Marcus Trescothick, wrote Coming Back to Me (2008), an autobiography described by Gideon Haigh as “seminal”, about the mental health problems that ended his own career. Even before that, Ken Barrington wrote a little-remembered book called Playing It Straight (1968) which revealed his own problems with mental health that prompted him to take a break from the game in 1966 because he felt “on the brink of a nervous breakdown”. But Barrington was clearly uncomfortable discussing such matters in print: apologetic, even defensive, and concerned with what his audience might think. Modern autobiographies suffer from similar guardedness, a sense of “what will they think?” But Gimblett largely speaking for Foot, not for the reading public, so that caution is replaced with complete honesty. Even if we cannot be certain that everything he said was factually accurate — or even, at times, fair — we are reading Gimblett’s unvarnished thoughts and opinions.

Our starting point really should be that amazing first-class debut, but this requires a little background. Harold Gimblett was born in 1914 at Blakes’ Farm, Bicknoller, Somerset. He was the youngest son of Percy and Louise Gimblett. His father was a farmer, making his family relatively prosperous; he and his two older brothers attended West Buckland school in North Devon. He quickly made his name as a cricketer, and was part of the school’s First Eleven by the age of 13. In one early game, he recalled the thrill of facing the opposition’s “demon” fast bowler when batting at number nine. His batting won the game and he later recalled it as one of his proudest achievements. He was always adventurous with the bat; he remembered hitting his first ball in an organised game of cricket for six; playing for West Buckland Second Eleven at the age of twelve, he once ran seven after hitting the ball into a patch of nettles but was out trying to improvise another shot into the same nettles. But he was highly effective at school level; Foot described him as “occasionally reckless, usually dominant”. Yet off the field, he struggled with homesickness and struggled to mix with his fellow pupils. He was reluctantly appointed the team captain at the age of fifteen; worried by the prospect of leading older boys, he initially tried to back out of the appointment.

Leaving school in 1931, he initially went to London to work in the grocery trade but soon returned to Somerset and worked on the family farm. He played plenty of club cricket, usually successfully, and rattled up several big scores. Playing for the Somerset Stragglers in 1932, he scored 142 in 75 mins against Wellington School from number six, his first ever century. The following season, he scored 150 in 80 minutes against the Stragglers, playing for Watchet. He played an increasing amount of cricket for Watchet, batting in a very carefree style that meant he would alter his approach — shutting up shop and defending, or throwing away his wicket — on a whim. But the number of runs he scored attracted attention from the press.

A local tailor called W. G. Penny thought that Gimblett was good enough to play for Somerset and encouraged him in this direction despite a palpable lack of enthusiasm from the man himself. He had to be cajoled into playing in the annual match between a Somerset XI and a team selected by Penny, but he made an impression in one such match by striking the former England bowler and ex-Somerset captain Jack White for three sixes. Somerset thought he was too risky a player, or not quite good enough. But Penny persisted and Gimblett was offered two-week trial as a professional in May 1935. As was typical in the Somerset team in this period, he was simply shown his place in the changing room and told to keep to himself. He did not excel in the nets and was told he was not good enough; the Somerset secretary John Daniell told him he would be paid for the first week and then let go. Gimblett latter claimed that had enjoyed the experience, but wasn’t too disappointed (although Foot believed that the actual event was more fraught and argumentative than Gimblett recalled in the 1970s). He performed some twelfth-man duties in one match, although he did not travel with the team to an away game.

But a late injury to Laurie Hawkins before Somerset played Essex at Frome on 18 May meant that a replacement could not be secured at short notice and so Gimblett was asked to play. The ground was in a somewhat rural location, making it hard for Gimblett to reach. He arranged a lift with a team-mate but missed his bus and had to hitch to the agreed rendezvous. When he arrived at the ground, he was very nervous; when he was advised that the Essex bowler Peter Smith would bowl him a googly early in his innings, he did not know what a googly was because he had never seen one. Or so he later claimed. Somerset won the toss, batted and crumbled to 106 for six shortly after lunch. The damage had been done by the pace bowling of Maurice Nichols. Gimblett came in, using the spare bat of Arthur Wellard (his own had looked dirty enough that Wellard suggested that he borrow his), who was already in the middle. Smith bowled him a googly third ball, but he took a single without reading it; the next over, he hit Smith for fifteen runs, including a six over mid-off.

Arthur Wellard (left) and Gimblett walking to the wicket in August 1935 (Image: Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 9 August 1935)

And with that, Gimblett began to score quickly. He and Wellard added 69 in nine overs, of which Wellard hit 48. He brought up his fifty with a six (28 minutes, 33 deliveries) and even after two quick wickets fell, Gimblett continued to hit, driving, sweeping and hooking. Assisted by a short boundary, his score mounted rapidly; a hook for four off Nichols was followed by a two. Although the primitive scoreboard did not include the individual scores of batters, spectators told him that he had reached an almost unbelievable century. It had taken 63 minutes and come out of 130 runs scored; it was the fastest century of the season, for which Gimblett was awarded the Walter Lawrence Trophy in September. He was eventually dismissed for 123 (79 minutes, 17 fours, 3 sixes); Somerset reached a total of 337 and, on the third day, won by an innings.

Although many batters had previously scored a century on their first-class debut — The Cricketer suggested that 22 men had done so in county cricket since 1868 — few had done so in such spectacular fashion; The Cricketer noted that the circumstances in which Gimblett batted, and the pace at which he scored, meant that he had “surely outdone all previous century debutants”. Inevitably, the press were enthralled and suddenly began to pay a huge amount of attention to Gimblett. His emergence from no-where, and his family background were a gift to newspapers. The Daily Mirror, for example, reported his debut under the headline “Farm Boy Surprises Cricket!” It also featured a photograph of Gimblett at work on his father’s farm on the first page of the newspaper.

Jack Hobbs, one of the press by then, wrote that an innings such as that played by Gimblett brought enormous pressure. And it quickly took its toll. In his next match, played at Lord’s, Gimblett scored fifty in the second innings, but had to use a runner and missed a month of cricket; and there were few runs after that. He struggled to mix with the other professionals and disliked the snobbery he saw in the game; he particularly disliked many of the amateur players. Although his trial was extended and he played regularly for the rest of the season, he scored just one more fifty and his final record — 482 first-class runs at an average of 17.21 — was quite a come-down from the fairy-tale of his debut. Wisden acknowledged his loss of form, and concluded: “Almost entirely a forward player, he appeared to pay little heed to defence, and in the end lack of experience contributed to his undoing. Still, shrewd observers maintain that he possesses distinct possibilities, and with further opportunities he may become more than a useful member of the side.”

Gimblett photographed working on his father’s farm a few days after his first-class debut (Image: Daily Mirror, 20 May 1935)

Despite his collapse in form in 1935, Gimblett had done enough to persuade the committee that he had a future at Somerset, and he signed a professional contract at the end of the season (which was worth £300 if he appeared in every match). But even if he had been uncertain whether he wanted to pursue career in cricket, his hand was somewhat forced by the death of his father, shortly before the 1936 season. His family took over the running of the farm, but the financial pressure was eased considerably if Gimblett could be “cut loose” by supporting himself through his new cricket career. Although he was a regular in the Somerset team until after the Second World War, it was not always a smooth road.

Looking back forty years later, Gimblett — without saying so explicitly — clearly identified signs in 1936 that all was not well. He began the season in spectacular form. He was promoted to open the batting — a position he held for the rest of his career — and in the opening game of the season, when Somerset played the touring Indian team, he scored a century. In the following game, he hit 93 and 160 not out against Lancashire; in the next, he scored a century before lunch on the second morning (after the first day had been washed out) against Northamptonshire, when he hit six sixes and nine fours. This rich vein of form catapulted him back into the newspapers and made him famous all over again. Almost inevitably, he came into contention for a place in the England team for the Test series against India. After a poor run of results, the Test selectors wanted to freshen up the team and replace some veterans; after his famous debut and such a good start to the season, Gimblett seemed the ideal candidate. And when the selectors went to watch him, they saw his century before lunch at Northamptonshire.

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Gimblett batting during his excellent start to the 1936 season

In the tapes he recorded for David Foot, Gimblett remembered listening to the announcement of the Test side on the radio, but there was no excitement or anticipation: “I prayed that I wouldn’t be included. Far from throwing my hat in the air, I was terrified. Suddenly I realised the fearful responsibilities resting on my shoulders. The telephone started ringing, cars arrived, the usual nonsense. I just wanted to go away and get lost. I didn’t want to play for England.” Nor did it get any easier when he arrived at Lord’s, where the first test was to be played. He never liked Lord’s throughout his career, feeling it to be a place of prejudice and snobbery. When he looked outside before the match began, he was overwhelmed by the sight of 30,000 spectators waiting for the start of play; he had to be reassured and distracted by his teammates, the Yorkshire players Hedley Verity and Maurice Leyland.

Gimblett’s experience of being selected bears quite a few similarities to the experiences of modern players who faced mental health problems during their careers. In a 2020 interview, Jonathan Trott described what happened before one Test in 2013: “I knew I was in a little bit of trouble, not wanting to play. That’s when the whole anxiety of putting the tracksuit on and going to the ground was triggered.” Trott in particular struggled with the scrutiny of playing at the top level by the end of his career. This sounds very similar to the experiences described by Gimblett. In the same feature, Marcus Trescothick described what happened to him in 2006: “I had no idea what was going on at that point. I had all these feelings and emotions — not sleeping, not eating, not really being able to enjoy life or cope with what was going on. That was when it went completely pear-shaped. I knew then I was in a world of trouble. I didn’t know how to cope with or understand it. It was anxiety more than anything — I have always suffered more with anxiety than depression. There was a constant feeling of alertness, adrenaline, being worried about what was going on and how I was feeling. A panic.” And the footballer Michael Carrick spoke about not wanting to be picked for England after his experiences in 2010: “I was depressed at times, yes. I told the FA, ‘Look, please don’t pick me’.”

But in 1936, there was far less understanding than there might be today. Although Verity and Leyland might have sensed something, and tried to take care of Gimblett, the authorities would prove less understanding. But in the short term, it looked as if Gimblett had made a great success of his debut. In a low-scoring, rain-affected game, batters on both teams struggled. Gimblett scored 11 in the first innings, finding it hard to cope with the swing bowling of Amar Singh, who took six for 35. India actually took a narrow first-innings lead, but when they were bowled out for 93 early on the third and final morning, England needed 107 to win, which could have been tricky. Gimblett had spoken to Jack Hobbs after his first innings and received some technical tips, and the results were immediate. Having lost his opening partner, Arthur Mitchell, without a run on the board, Gimblett hit an unbeaten 67 in 100 minutes, the highest score of the game and one of only two fifties, including four successive fours from the pace-bowling of Mohammad Nissar. He had made a shaky start; but Wisden recorded: “As Gimblett got the pace of the wicket, however, he developed sound hitting powers and hooked superbly … The conditions during the last innings certainly favoured the batting side but Gimblett, who hit eleven 4s, played with much skill and nerve on his debut in Test cricket.” England won by nine wickets and Gimblett was once again the successful debutant. The Times called it “a glorious innings” and suggested he was a certain selection for the rest of the summer and beyond.

But Gimblett played just one more Test that summer, and only two more in the remainder of his career. While part of the reason was doubtless because his attacking style and refusal to play with more restraint concerned the England selectors, Gimblett’s story is far more complicated than that. In later years, many of his team-mates believed, he actively tried to prevent his own selection. And despite a very successful career that lasted until 1954, Gimblett never quite lived up to either his first-class or his Test debut. His cricket, like his life away from the sport, became a battle that he eventually lost…

The Inkosi’s Grandson: The Thwarted Career of C. A. V. Makaula

Claude Makaula-White photographed in 1915 (Image courtesy of John Charlesworth and Kent College)

As the 1928 tour of England by the West Indies cricket team drew to a close, some of the visiting team played a one-day match that wasn’t part of the official programme. On 28 September, a team styled the “West Indies” played a Bolton Cricket League team at Piggott Park in Farnworth, a town near Bolton. The game was organised to raise money for the Social Circle Club by a man called Dr Lucas. The match was not taken too seriously by anyone — Learie Constantine scored 65 in 18 minutes (with eight fours and five sixes) in the West Indies’ brief second innings, when they scored 102 for four in eight overs — but the crowd of fewer than 2,000 was a disappointment. Nevertheless, although the game received hardly any coverage in the English press, it represented something unusual because only the non-white members of the West Indies team played, and the side was captained by Constantine. To fill the vacancies in the eleven, local players were recruited, but it is possible that they were not white either, implying some form of conscious decision by either the team-members or the organisers. For example, one of the reinforcements was a man called K. Narayansingh, about whom no information is available except that he took part in a tour of Scotland organised by Constantine the following year, when the press referred to him as a West Indian cricketer. Another recruit was a man listed as C. A. V. Makaula; he scored a duck batting at number eight and took three for 21 with the ball. More is known about Makaula than Narayansingh. He was actually South African and although he never quite made it as a cricketer, he played professionally for a time. And his story — and that of his family — is a remarkable one.

To understand the story of Claude Makaula, it is necessary to begin with his father, the man who came to be known as Albert Makaula-White. He had been born in what is today part of South Africa in 1865. His father — Claude’s grandfather — was Chief Makaula, Inkosi (ruler or king) of the Bhaca people who lived in Mount Frere, today part of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. When Albert was a baby, he grew seriously ill; his mother, one of Chief Makaula’s wives, suggested taking him to a nearby Methodist mission to see if he could be cured. The minister of the mission was a British man called the Reverend Charles White, who lived there with his wife; they had no children. Chief Makaula said that if his son recovered, the Whites could keep him; otherwise they could bury him. In something that sounds like it belongs to the realms of fiction, the baby recovered, was adopted by the White family and renamed Albert Makaula-White. As a result of this unusual background, Albert spent part of his youth in South Africa among the Methodist community but also spent time in England. Certainly he was there around the time his adoptive father died in 1888 but returned to South Africa in 1890 when his adoptive mother was dying.

With both of his parents dead, Albert relocated to England where he began to study theology and followed in the footsteps of Charles White by becoming a Methodist minister. From October 1890 to October 1891, he attended the Richmond Theological College in Surrey. During that time, he appears to have travelled extensively around Britain, speaking to various Wesleyan groups, and lived at several addresses. His studies ended, according to the records of the Theological College, when he was “recalled” by the South African Methodist Conference. The historian Marika Sherwood, who has written about Albert Makaula-White, suggests that the conference was reluctant to continue funding the studies of an African, certainly after the death of Charles White. Therefore, Albert had to begin making arrangements to return home. In December 1891, he married Eleanor Botting, a dressmaker and the daughter of a carpenter, in Strood, Kent. The marriage certificate describes Albert as a Wesleyan Minister and described his father as a “native African chief”. Curiously, Albert’s address was in Pudsey, Yorkshire. Sherwood has tentatively identified a possible connection with that location through the Reverend Faraday, based at Pudsey’s Wesleyan Chapel, who was a former missionary in Africa and had lived in Kent for a time; perhaps he knew Albert from one or both of those locations and had invited him to stay with him after leaving the College.

Quite how a mixed marriage would have been received in 1891 is hard to say, but it is extraordinarily unlikely that reactions would have been positive. Racism was widespread in Britain and other marriages between white English women and black Africans generated hostile reactions in newspapers. This might have been the explanation for a very strange and apparently false story printed in a local newspaper at the time of Albert’s marriage, which suggested that he had failed to arrive for the wedding. But the event certainly took place; there is just a hint that Eleanor Botting’s family either approved of the relationship or had at least accepted it, because two of their number were listed as witnesses on the marriage certificate. Perhaps there was social cachet in having the son of an “African chief” in the family.

Not long after the wedding, Albert returned to South Africa; he was followed a few months later by his wife. They found a country changing rapidly and perhaps already becoming unrecognisable from the one in which Albert was raised by the White family. An influx of speculators and investors from Britain, chasing the newly discovered gold and diamonds of South Africa had changed the demographics and accelerated a hardening of racist attitudes, such as the denial of votes to non-white residents the passing of laws that restricted the rights of the native population. Mount Frere, renamed KwaBhaca, had grown, filled with white settlers such as lawyers, traders, government officials and a detachment of soldiers. It would have been a very different life for Eleanor Botting; according to Sherwood: “On arrival, the couple were housed in one of the ‘rondavels’ (a round one-room ‘hut’ with thatch roofing) in the Chief’s ‘Great Place’, with fresh water in the nearby stream and certainly no electricity.” Nor would Eleanor have been too popular with the white population owing to her marriage to Albert.

Soon after, Albert and Eleanor moved around fifty miles, to a town called Idutwya, where he worked an Assistant Clerk and interpreter, receiving a salary of £120. When Cecil Rhodes visited Chief Makaula in 1894, Albert was the interpreter. And it was during this period that he and Eleanor had their three children: Irene Dorothy Frances (1893), Charles Frederick Clifton (1897) and Claude Albert Vivian (1898 or 1899). All three were born in Idutwya, but in 1899 Albert was promoted to “chief constable” and the family moved to Libode. Albert’s new role meant that he was the interpreter for a local magistrate and a kind of pseudo-valet who was also responsible for collecting “hut tax” for the government. In August 1901 he again acted as an interpreter for his father when the Duke of York visited Cape Town. But that December, Albert was charged with seizing goods from a hut-tax payer who had been unable to pay cash; he pleaded “guilty under provocation” and lost his job. An appeal was unsuccessful and he turned down an offer of work around 60 miles away that would have separated him from his family. Sherwood suggests that racism was at play in both his dismissal and the refusal of the appeal. But the loss of his job was the likely motivation for his decision in 1904 to take his family back to England.

Therefore Claude moved to England around the age of five; although we do not know if he ever returned to South Africa, he certainly remained in England for the rest of his life. It is unclear what the family’s intentions were, but Albert soon began working as a farmer, despite a lack of previous experience. Nor is it clear whether Albert immediately worked on his own account or was employed by someone else, but by the time of the 1911 census — when the family lived at Stubble Hill in Harrietsham, Kent — he was listed as an “employer” (i.e. other people worked for him) and worked as a “small farmer”. Soon after, the family moved to Rose Lawn in Margate. Albert lived a quiet life as a farmer until early 1928, when the RSPCA took him to court for neglecting the pigs on his farm; there appears to have been a misunderstanding over who would feed the pigs in snowy weather, and he was fined £10. However, the story ignited interest in him and he was interviewed about his life in the local newspaper; the resulting article appeared in abbreviated form around the world, telling of how the “Zulu [sic] chief’s son” was working as a farmer in Kent. In later years, he suffered financial difficulty and noted rising prejudice on account of his race. He died in 1937.

Charles Makaula-White in an undated photograph (Image courtesy of John Charlesworth and Kent College)

It is possible to trace Claude and his brother Charles after they settled in England. They are listed as being at (an unnamed) school on the 1911 census under the surname Makaula-White (Irene was visiting the family of William and Harriet Day, and was listed as Irene White). But from around 1913, possibly a little sooner, the two brothers attended Kent College, a Methodist school in Canterbury. We do not know if they attended as boarders (although this is quite likely), nor if they joined the school at the same time, nor precisely when they left. Whether through their choice or that of the school, the “Makaula” part of their name was dropped on school records and they were simply known as “White”.

Where the two boys finally become more than simply names on a page is on the sports field. By 1914, both featured in the first eleven of the school cricket team; both were bowlers, although Charles was more of an all-rounder, possessing a solid defence. Yet Claude, according to the school magazine, was at times devastating: “His bowling figures hardly do him justice, and at times he has bowled with wretched luck”. It described him as having “the makings of a good fast bowler”, “a very sound field, sometimes brilliant” and being “responsible for much of our success in boys’ matches” (i.e. games against other schools). If Charles improved with bad and ball in 1915, Claude suffered something of a falling off with the ball, losing some of his accuracy, but improving as a batter. It was at this point that both Charles and Claude seem to have left school, so we hear no more about their progress. But both seem to have excelled in at least one other sport; there is a photograph of Charles in what appears to be the school football team, and of Claude in the school hockey team.

The Kent College cricket team in 1915. Back row: Mr Hargreaves, F. Amos, F. W. H. Bunting, Mr Brownscombe, R. Robertson, L Poulter, H. Juniper, Middle row: C. A. [Claude] White [sic], B. A. Castle, C. F. C. [Charles] White [sic], A. C. Horrell. On floor: E. A. Coleman, W. E. Watson, A. R. Skinner. (Image courtesy of John Charlesworth and Kent College)

It is worth dwelling a little longer on Charles. In later years, he played local cricket for Eythorne as a batter, but also played football for Dover United in 1928. Also that year he played one match for Kent Club and Ground; this might imply a trial for the county groundstaff rather than any suggestion that he was on Kent’s books. Did he want to play sport professionally? It is likely that he was talented enough; did reservations about his colour hold him back? Or perhaps his ambitions never lay in that direction because in later years he worked as a shepherd, according to a local obituary, and won prizes at county shows. He wanted to be a farmer but was never able to own a farm; he eventually became a miner until retiring in his sixties. One who worked with him recalled how he was “very popular with his workmates and in more lighthearted moments would tease them about his chieftain father”. He continued to play cricket for his local village. His son John was killed in an accident, aged just 25, in May 1950 while taking part in practices for the Isle of Man TT, and Charles was never quite the same afterwards. He died in 1976.

As for Claude, it is not entirely certain, assuming that he left Kent College in 1915, what he did for the next few years because the next certain trace of him comes in 1919, when he began to work for an auctioneers, Honeyball and Finn, in Deal, Kent, while continuing to live with his father. He was an articled clerk and responsible for handling large amounts of money but after failing to pass his examinations, he remained with the firm as an “improver” at a nominal salary of 25 shillings per week in order to study for another attempt. In July 1920, he chose to join another firm in Canterbury. But an audit of the Honeyball and Finn finances revealed that Makaula-White had been taking money from the firm. When confronted by a police officer, Claude not only admitted the charge but confessed to stealing a total of around £375 between August 1919 and May 1920. He used some of the money to buy a motorbike, but lost other amounts through stock investments and the purchase of pigs. His arrest and adjourned initial hearing in January 1921 was reported in the local press; the Thanet Advertiser used the headline “Sportsman Arrested” and called him “a well-known Thanet sportsman”. He was bailed until a hearing before the Recorder (which received no press coverage) in March 1921. He pleaded guilty to five counts of larceny (charges of “making false entries” were dropped) and was sentenced to five months imprisonment. He served his sentence at HMP Canterbury, and was listed as an inmate there on the 1921 census. This revealed that he had lost his job as a managing clerk after his imprisonment, and was a British resident but did not have British nationality.

Bowling Old Lane Cricket Ground in an undated photograph (Image: Bradford Sports History)

It was after his release that Claude seems to have decided to attempt a career in cricket. He spent the 1922 season in Bradford, playing for Bowling Old Lane, a club in the Bradford cricket League. At the time, the Bradford League was one of the most prestigious in England. Through being the only cricket league to continue employing professionals during the First World War, it had attracted some of the biggest names in English cricket. For a time in the early 1920s, alongside the Lancashire League, it was a serious counter-attraction to county cricket until the counties increased their wages beyond a point with which the Bradford League — a declining attraction by then — could compete. Nevertheless, some of the professionals in 1922 included the England Test cricketer Sydney Barnes and several players on the fringes of the Yorkshire cricket team. Claude — having dropped “White” from his name and listed as C. A. V. Makaula — seems to have only been with the club for one season. An article in The Athletic mistakenly called him “the Old Laner’s West Indian recruit” but he was successful, playing regularly and although his overall figures are not known, he took at least five wickets in an innings on three occasions. He was almost certainly playing as a professional — his family continued to live in Kent and there was no obvious other reason for him to be in Bradford. And if there is no indication of how he came to join Bowling Old Lane, perhaps there was some connection with his father’s acquaintances in Pudsey (a town with two clubs in the Bradford League); or maybe he had simply offered his services to a range of clubs because his school record would have been appealing to prospective employers, particularly if he was still a fast bowler.

We can be fairly sure that Claude was the only non-white player in the Bradford League at the time; there had been black and Asian players in club and county cricket before the war, but they were a rarity in the professional leagues. Only Charlie Llewellyn, who had appeared for Undercliffe during the war and who might have been mixed race (although he always denied it, and despite the suggestion in later years that there were rumours about his ethnicity, he generally seems to have “passed” as white), had appeared in the Bradford League or its main rival the Lancashire League. In the late 1920s and 1930s, the growth of West Indian cricket inspired several clubs to sign black players, but when Claude was playing for Bowling Old Lane, there had not been a West Indian visit to England for sixteen years.

Charlie Llewellyn (Image: Wikipedia)

Despite Claude’s apparent success, he was not retained at Bowling Old Lane, nor does he seem to have ever played for any other Bradford League clubs. Although he had not given up on his ambitions to be a professional cricketer, he returned to the family home in Kent, where he was tangentially involved in another criminal case in 1923 when his father prosecuted a man called William Samuel Barnard for stealing a bicycle and eleven silver spoons that belonged to Claude. The man had come to know Albert Makaula-White during the war, when Barnard was based at Manston Aerodrome, and he had visited the family home several times. In court, Barnard claimed to know nothing of the spoons, to have only borrowed the bicycle and to have left a note explaining such. He also claimed that Claude’s sister, Irene Makaula-White, had ordered him to leave the house and threatened to kill him (he unsuccessfully requested a protection order). Even though Barnard was found with pawn tickets for spoons, and had left the bicycle in at a garage for repair, and despite his apparently openly mocking and jocular tone in court, the case was dismissed. Barnard also claimed that he had been heading to Harrow School to work as a cricket coach, and that he had been in hospital until recently “with a serious breakdown”. This latter suggestion might explain why no further action was taken as he might not have been a well man.

Around this time, Irene had begun an unusual career of her own. During the war, she had performed songs at Manston Aerodrome (where she might have met Barnard) and by 1920 she was advertising as a dance instructor, listing herself as a pupil of Mrs Leslie, the President of the London Teachers’ Dancing Association, By 1928, according to a report in a South African newspaper, the Daily Dispatch, she was performing in the London Pavilion as part of the chorus in Ol’ Man River. The report said that she had entered the theatre after “a recent heavy financial loss in the family.” But she had something of a talent for publicity. She — or someone on her behalf — also advertised as “Princess Irene”, the daughter of a “Zulu king” who supposedly sent her to Europe for her education. In the 1930s, she also spent time in France working as a “theatrical artist”. By the mid-1930s, she was claiming in the People newspaper that she could cure rheumatism with the touch of her hands. Although we do not know how successful any of her ventures were, she seems to have achieved a minor celebrity status. In later years, her path would cross once more with that of Claude.

A photograph of Irene Makaula (or “Princess Irene”) from 1928, when she was in the chorus of Show Boat at the Drury Lane Theatre. Under a title of “A Royal Chorus-Girl”, the caption said that she was the daughter of a “Zulu king and an Englishwoman” and was “a princess in her own right of Bacaland in Northern Rhodesia”. (Image: The Graphic, 8 September 1928)

“Princess” Irene Makaula in London in 1932 (Image: The Sphere, 24 December 1932)

As for Claude, after leaving Bowling Old Lane he seems to have returned to farming. He is listed on the Electoral Register at Godhead Farm in 1924, and in 1925 Poverest Farm in St Mary Cray, is listed as ‘Makaula-White & Son’. But this might only have been a stop-gap because he seems to have moved into cricket coaching; the same 1928 report that described his sister as appearing on stage in the Daily Dispatch said that Claude was a “well-known cricket coach in Dublin”. His daughter believed that this was a role at a school, and certainly becoming a school coach was an attractive option for professional cricketers who could not make it at the top level, or who could not find a well-paying club. Around the same time, he made a serious attempt to break into the Lancashire League, by that stage the premier club completion in England. In May 1927, still playing under the name C. A. V. Makaula, he was given a trial by East Lancashire Cricket Club during their match against Bacup after their usual professional, Ralph Whitehead, was absent with a torn muscle. According to the Athletic News (which mistakenly called Claude an Anglo-Indian), “the crowd was interested in his league appearance, and in his short stay he did well.” He scored 11 not out, batting at number four, before rain washed the match out. In 1928, he played twice in July for Rishon (one of many professionals the team tried that season) and did fairly well: he took four for 60 (and scored a duck) against Church and scored 26 and took three for 70 against Rawtenstall.

These appearances attracted some notice in the press. For example after the first match, the Accrington Observer and Times said: “Makaula, a West African, who has recently held a coaching engagement in Ireland, was engaged as professional, [which] invested the game at Rishton. on Saturday, with no little interest … In the professional for the day, however, one was not disapointed. A powerfully built man, he was obviously the most conspicuous man on the field, but his whole demeanour was pleasing.” The writer continued:

“A right arm medium to fast bowler, he is the posessor of a very easy action, and he swerved the ball beautifully into the wickets. Though he only took four wickets at a cost of 60 runs he ought to have had six, for two catches were dropped. Unfortunately he did not shine as a batsman, being out to his fifth ball without scoring, but one got the idea from his stance at the wickets that he would indeed be a powerful hitter if he got going. I understand that the idea of bringing Makaula over from Ireland was that he should be given a trial with a view to being signed on as professional for the rest of the season. Although one would not like to commit oneself after seeing his one performance, one might easily say that the Rishton officials could go much further and fare worse.”

A follow-up feature written before his second match noted that he was engaged at Sallins, a town in County Kildare, Ireland, but that the Rishton committee had not yet made an offer (although a suggestion a few sentences later that “no agreement was arrived at” could be interpreted to say that Makaula-White had not accepted the terms offered). This is the only indication of where he had been based in Ireland, and there is no explanation of what drew him there.

After the second match, the same newspaper noted: “Chief interest in the match [against Rawtenstall] from Rishton’s point of view, lay in the appearance and performance of Makaula, a West African, who has recently held a coaching engagement in Ireland, and although his debut was not of the most favourable kind he gave ample indication that granted the opportunity to accustom himself more to Lancashire League Cricket he will certainly improve the Rishton side. What the committee think, however, regarding the appointment of a new professional remains yet to be seen.” He had another two catches dropped but played “some lovely strokes” in his 26. Ten days after the Rawtenstall match, the Todmorden and District News noted that Rishton were still seeking a professional but that their financial worries restricted what they were able to do, even though they were at the bottom of the league. It appeared that the club were still attempting to sign Claude, but nothing further was done.

Although this was the limit of Claude Makaula’s Lancashire League experience, like he had been in the Bradford League, he was one of the first non-white players in the competition; Llewellyn had preceded him there, as he had in Bradford, and even while Claude was playing for Rishton, the Nelson Committee were in pursuit of the signature of Learie Constantine. Perhaps Claude’s novelty was what brought him to the attention of those who organised the match between the touring West Indies team and the Bolton Cricket League. The game was the idea of Dr Vincent St Claire Lucas, a Trinidadian doctor who lived in Bolton. Whether it was Lucas or Constantine who invited Makaula-White is uncertain. Nor do we know if Makaula-White played professionally for any other teams; there were several lower profile leagues, such as the Central Lancashire League and the Bolton League, but it is likely that the novelty of a “West African” playing would have attracted local press attention and there is no evidence of that.

After this, Claude disappears from the records until his entry on the 1939 Register, taken on the outbreak of the Second World War. It listed him as living at Tenterden, Kent, with his mother and sister (“studying for professional singer”; she gave her birthday as 6 August 1903, taking around nine years off her age). The record gave his date of birth as 7 April 1897 and he was listed as a “feeding stuffs salesman”. All three family members had dropped the “White” part of their surname and were listed purely as “Makaula”.

At Maidstone in 1942, Claude married Iris Hadlow, a 33 year old woman who lived with her parents and worked in the local post office. The following year, their only child Joan was born (registered as Joan Makaula). They lived on St Luke’s Road in Maidstone from 1945 until 1967, and Irene lived with them until 1949, perhaps after their mother died in 1944. During the war, Claude worked as an ambulance driver and served in the ARP service. After the war, Joan recalled that he had “various jobs”, usually involving driving lorries, until he began working as a mechanic in a garage. She also recalled that he had an “abiding interest” in cricket and played until not long before his death. An obituary in the Kent Messenger said that he had worked “for 20 years as a servicing operator for Miles of Maidstone”, which was a distributor for Leyland Light Commercials. And, after Irene had become a naturalised British citizen in July 1962, Claude followed suite, receiving his certificate of naturalisation in June 1963.

Claude died in Maidstone, aged 68, in October 1965. Three years later, his sister Irene died. His wife lived until 1988. The extraordinary story of him and his family was largely forgotten until Marika Sherwood (assisted by Gillian Rickard) began to research Albert Makaula-White around 2000, resulting in a book published in 2012, The Life and Times of Albert Makaula-White, an African Farmer in Kent 1904–1937. But the story of Claude’s connection with cricket, briefly mentioned by Sherwood, was never followed up. Which is unfortunate because it is a story that touches on many issues, including that of the restrictions placed on non-white cricketers in South Africa in this period and the country’s all-white Test team. His sadly unrecorded experiences growing up in England and attending a Methodist school in the mid-1910s would be a fascinating topic even had he never picked up a cricket bat. His family experienced racism, and his father was one of the few people to speak out about it. And Claude became one of the first non-white cricketers to appear in league cricket, just before the explosion of interest in black cricketers inspired by the success of Learie Constantine (whom Claude must have known). Ironically, had he tried again a few years later, the desire to emulate Nelson Cricket Club’s initiative with Constantine might have allowed him to pursue the professional career in the sport that he so clearly wished for.

Note: Thanks to Marika Sherwood who kindly provided a copy of her work on Albert Makaula-White, without provided invaluable background for this article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knightsbridge Barracks as it would have looked in 1880

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

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

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

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

“Faults of private character”: The Decline of Edward Pooley

Ted Pooley in a photograph published in 1893 (Image: Wikipedia)

Professional cricketers around the turn of the twentieth century led a precarious existence. Their lack of job security meant that they were never more than a short step from ruin unless they reached the top of the game. For example, Luke Greenwood played for Yorkshire but only kept out of the workhouse through the help of friends; his team-mate Alfred Smith was declared bankrupt at least once; and Harry Pickett’s financial desperation led him to take his own life. Perhaps it could be argued that none of these men ever reached the top of the professional game, but even achieving those heights was no guarantee of future prosperity. William Scotton played regularly for England but financial worries after losing his place in the Nottinghamshire team might have played a role in his suicide in 1893; Bill Brockwell played for Surrey and England in the 1890s, yet died in homeless poverty in the 1930s. But the ultimate “cautionary tale” for late-Victorian professional cricketers was Edward Pooley, an earlier Surrey cricketer, who would have played for England in what is today recognised as the first ever Test match had he not been temporarily imprisoned at the time.

Pooley was one of the few first-class cricketers to have been forced into the workhouse; other professionals had a similar fate, such as John William Burnham, who played briefly for Derbyshire, and William Ralph Hunter who spent time on the groundstaff at Lord’s and the Oval. But Pooley was many rungs up the ladder because he was one of the leading players in England and among the best wicket-keepers of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for him, he also seemed to attract controversy; his Wisden obituary concluded: “Of the faults of private character that marred Pooley’s career and were the cause of the poverty in which he spent the later years of his life there is no need now to speak. He was in many ways his own enemy, but even to the last he had a geniality and sense of humour that to a certain extent condoned his weaknesses.” Was this too harsh a view? Or was Pooley entirely responsible for his own fate? As usual, the answer lies somewhere between those two extremes.

Pooley’s full story has been told by Keith Booth in a biography published in 2000, but he has recently been the subject of a very unusual book by Rodney Ulyate called The Autobiography of Edward Pooley. Although it is not in any sense a conventional autobiography, most of it was written by Pooley in the sense that it is culled from various interviews and pieces of writing that he provided during his lifetime. While there are limitations with such a format, this approach offers something different from the usual biographies of old cricketers. Too often all that survives from this period are the pseudo-official verdicts of Wisden or the deliberations of Harry Altham’s Olympian Judgements from his History of Cricket: for example, the Lords Harris and Hawke were benevolent dictators; Pelham Warner and Gubby Allen were patriarchs acting for the good of cricket; and Pooley was a “bad boy”. In any kind of serious history, such views would long ago have been challenged, modified or re-examined, but until very recently the interpretation of cricket’s past appeared to be unchanging, set in stone.

Part of the problem has been a lack of accessible sources. Many older biographies of cricketers relied either on the recollections of those who were around at the time or reheating the same tired stories and anecdotes. Today, excellent primary sources are often available online and historians increasingly make use of them, and of various archives that contain fascinating material. Booth for example used Surrey’s own archives to write his biography of Pooley, but Ulyate’s Autobiography of Edward Pooley is a move towards a more serious historical approach; in effect, the book is a collection of primary sources allowing anyone to see what Pooley had to say for himself. Such books are familiar to anyone who has studied history at an academic level, and are essential tools in the subject. For cricket to have similar resources would be a big step forward, opening up great possibilities. Furthermore, there are many cricketers for whom a similar project would be possible as there were a surprising number of interviews given by old players, even in the nineteenth century. Pooley is, however, a particularly interesting subject because he had a lot to say and was happy to tell journalists all about himself on several occasions. If the cricket establishment had made its judgement on Pooley, their target was keen to get across his own viewpoint. Because whether or not Pooley was the ultimate cautionary tale, he endured several controversial episodes, which he tried (not entirely successfully) to explain away.

What often got lost (and still does to a large extent whenever a writer revisits Pooley’s career) is what a good cricketer he was. Although there is no need to say too much here about his playing career — Booth and Ulyate provide all the detail anyone could want, and his Wisden obituary noted: “Two or three pages of Wisden could easily be filled with details of his doings” — it is worth giving a brief summary. Pooley recorded more dismissals than any of his contemporary wicket-keepers. Three times he stumped four opposition batters in an innings and twice stumped five. His twelve dismissals in a match against Sussex in 1868 has only been surpassed twice in first-class cricket; it was not equalled for seventy years and not beaten until 1995–96. As Ulyate points out, contemporary praise for Pooley was widespread (albeit not universal, particularly regarding his ability standing up to fast bowling) and he was among the first wicket-keepers to dispense with a long-stop to fast bowling. But it is notoriously difficult to assess wicket-keepers as detailed statistics about chances have only been kept in recent years, and the number of dismissals completed depends on more than simply the skill of the individual. Trying to ascertain objectively how good Pooley was with the gloves is a hopeless task, but there is no doubt that he was one of the most respected wicket-keepers of his time.

Pooley was also a decent batter. Wisden said: “Apart from his wicket-keeping Pooley was a first-rate bat, free in style, with fine driving power and any amount of confidence. He made many good scores and would without a doubt have been a much greater run-getter if he had not been so constantly troubled by damaged hands. During the Canterbury Week of 1871 he played an innings of 93 when suffering from a broken finger.” To a modern audience, his first-class average of 15.86 is underwhelming but in the 1860s and 1870s, a time of almost impossible wickets, it would have been respectable enough. Moreover, in 1870 he scored over 1,000 first-class runs, the mark of a quality batter (he was only one of three men to reach four figures that season; one was W. G. Grace), and he fell just 74 runs short of the same mark in 1871. In his best seasons, he averaged in the early 20s with the bat which placed him high in the seasonal lists. More to the point, wicket-keepers were explicitly not expected to be good batters, so Pooley’s batting record was exceptional for the period.

In short, he was a formidable cricketer. But while Ulyate regrets that so much of what has been written about Pooley concerns his faults rather than his achievements, it is this personal side that makes him fascinating. There have been many brilliant cricketers, and there is little to be gained by simply listing their deeds. Pooley’s life off the field is more interesting than his career on it, and reading what he had to say for himself brings the man to life. Rather than give a succession of bland interviews, as so many cricketers have done over the years, his voice comes across strongly in the Autobiography. And you can almost hear the anger in his tone. Yet Pooley never quite succeeds in convincing the reader that he was blameless in the many misfortunes to befall him.

Luke Greenwood in 1884 (Image: National Library of Australia)

Nevertheless, his ultimate fall should be set into some kind of context. Pooley was far from alone in struggling during his final years. Alfred Pullin, writing in the late 1890s, noted how several former Yorkshire professionals (not just Smith and Greenwood) found themselves in deep financial strife and had been “cast aside like an old shoe”. For example Pullin found John Thewlis toothless and almost blind living in abject poverty in Manchester. John Jackson, a Derbyshire bowler of the 1850s and 1860s died in the workhouse. Nor were such circumstances only endured by northern professionals; the Surrey player Julius Caesar was found dead in a tavern in Godalming having spent his final years living in great hardship. There were countless similar examples, some of which were listed by Ric Sissons in The Players (1988); and cases like William Scotton or Arthur Shrewsbury betray the lack of care given to former players by the cricket authorities around the turn of the twentieth century.

There is little doubt that the cricketing establishment blamed such players for their own fate, even if this view was rarely aired in print. Professionals who played between the 1860s and 1890s were regarded as irresponsible, untrustworthy and lacking “moral character”. The amateurs who ran county cricket culled this generation of professionals from the game so that only those who were prepared obediently to follow instructions remained. Lord Hawke’s reformation of the ill-disciplined Yorkshire team in the 1880s — which ended the careers of several talented players — was perhaps the best-known example of professionals being “brought to heel”, but the amateur leadership of many counties followed a similar process. County teams became populated by the “respectable professional”. Yet the county committees rarely — if ever — took into account the circumstances of their players; their need to earn a living, their upbringings that often featured extreme poverty, and their independence which made them reluctant to obey unquestioningly. Nor did the professionals have any reason to accept the Victorian convention that their “social class” was inherently inferior and they should give way to their “betters”, the middle and upper classes.

So when Wisden briefly summarised the fate of another fallen professional, those who read the obituary would have sighed and concluded that a sad end was inevitable for someone of that nature. It was the way of the world. These working-class men were responsible for their own fate, but the poor chaps simply could not help themselves. All of this would have been implied and understood. But in Pooley’s case, it was made explicit. Wisden concluded that “faults of private character” made Pooley “his own enemy”. Others, while lamenting the fate of a talented cricketer, concurred with this view. Ironically, Pooley had quite a middle-class background — his father was a schoolmaster — but never fitted into that world when he was a cricketer. And his actions during his playing career stripped away any sympathy that the establishment might have felt, such as that expressed for Thewlis, Greenwood, Brockwell or Caesar. By contrast, Pooley invited only condemnation, albeit tinged with some regret and sympathy after his death in 1907.

So what made him such a cautionary tale? There were several elements in his cricketing and social downfall. The first was unsporting behaviour. In 1873, Pooley was suspected of having “thrown” a cricket match when Surrey played Yorkshire in order to win a bet. Pooley denied the charge, to the Surrey Committee at the time and when interviewed by Pullin in 1899, and both Booth and Ulyate believe him. He admitted having placed several half-crown bets (or in his later version, two bottles of champagne) that certain Surrey players would outscore named opposition batters, but not having “thrown” the game. Yet the case was not quite straightforward: Pooley was replaced behind the stumps during the final stages of the match, and he was charged by the Surrey Committee not with throwing the game, but with insubordination and misconduct. In a letter to the Committee, Pooley claimed that if he had seemed not to be trying, it was because he was unwell, and he admitted “using coarse language” towards the Surrey captain. Booth speculated that if he had won a bottle of champagne, he might have been drinking, which resulted in his removal from the team, his “coarse language”, and his underperformance. In any case, Pooley was suspended for the rest of the season and only eventually readmitted to the team after making an apology.

Nor was he above what would still be regarded as unsporting behaviour; for example, when Charles Absolom of Cambridge was dismissed for “obstructing the field” in 1868, it was Pooley who had appealed when the returning ball struck the batter on the back while he was attempting to complete his sixth run. And in 1870 he ran out Charles Nepean of Oxford University after the batter had left the crease mistakenly believing that he had been given out lbw. Of this incident, Pooley said: “I most firmly assert now what I asserted at the time: that I genuinely believed that [the umpire] had given him out, and that what I did afterwards I did entirely without premeditation.” Any cricitism should have been equally attached to Surrey’s captain, who could have withdrawn the appeal if he considered it unsporting, but Pooley received the blame and Surrey held an internal enquiry after the President of the MCC intervened. It was concluded that there was no intention of unfair play, but Oxford did not play Surrey for ten years after that game. Yet perhaps stigma surrounding Pooley attracted stories like that, such as when he was accused (with little justification) of time-wasting during the Gentlemen v Players match at the Oval in 1869.

A second problem for the authorities was Pooley’s temper, because it was not just his own captain who was the subject of his fury. On at least two occasions in the late 1860s, both admitted by Pooley himself, he accosted journalists whom he believed had written unfairly about him, swearing at one and threatening another to the extent that he was forced to appear before magistrates and apologise. On both occasions, he seems to have been at least partially driven by their disregard for professional cricketers. But his temper — as well as a love of gambling — got the better of him on one particular occasion that meant he would never be a Test cricketer.

The English team that toured Australia in 1876–77. Back row: Harry Jupp, Tom Emmett, Alfred Hogben (sponsor), Allen Hill, Tom Armitage. Seated: Ted Pooley, James Southerton, James Lillywhite, Alfred Shaw, George Ulyett, Andrew Greenwood. On floor: Harry Charlwood, John Selby. (Image: Wikipedia)

In 1876–77, Pooley was the wicket-keeper in the team organised by James Lillywhite to tour Australia. Two of the games, against a full Australian team, were later recognised as the first official Test matches. But when those games took place, Pooley was absent — necessitating the use of a stand-in wicket-keeper — because he had been imprisoned in New Zealand during a brief visit there by Lillywhite’s team. He had placed a slightly unethical but not illegal bet with a local man: he used a common ruse of betting on the number of ducks that would be scored by the opposition, but one that required only a few ducks for the bettor to return a profit. But Pooley’s own account (as given in the Autobiography) neglects one detail provided by Booth: that he was umpiring the match in question, having been unwell for several days and unable to play. Although Pooley won his bet, the man refused to pay up; a scuffle resulted, Pooley made threats and when someone apparently tried to break into the man’s hotel room overnight, he was the obvious suspect (although Ulyate suspects, as Pooley claimed, that this was his team-mates trying to get his money; two possible suspects, George Ulyett and John Selby, were later involved in other troubles during tours of Australia). Pooley was charged with “assault and malicious damage to property” but ultimately found not guilty. If Pooley had done nothing technically wrong, the incident in no way reflected well on him.

A third factor might have been the nature of his personal life; although no-one ever publicly commented on it, his circumstances might have been known by the Surrey Committee. He had married a woman called Ellen Hunt in 1863, and the couple had six children. But around the time their sixth child was born in 1873, he abandoned his wife; by 1881 Ellen and three of their children were in Hackney Workhouse. He apparently never reconciled with their children, two of whom recorded him as deceased on their marriage certificates long before his death. In 1874, Pooley had the first of eight children with his common-law wife (he never divorced Ellen), Jemima “Minnie” Sabine, a woman of around 20 who was around ten years younger than him, and who was estranged from her own husband (who had failed in a bid to divorce her for adultery with two men, neither of whom was Pooley). She was listed as Minnie Pooley on the 1881 and 1891 census, although they never married.

However, Pooley was by no means the only professional to have marital difficulties. At a time when divorce was difficult and expensive, such a course was commonly taken by working class couples who wished to separate. If they had simply drifted apart — as opposed to having committed a divorce-worthy act such as adultery — it was often easiest just to go their separate ways. As they had no official means to divorce and remarry, they simply co-habited with other people. In Pooley’s case, there is one curiosity. Although he would have been expected to support his estranged wife financially, there is no record that he did so, even when she was admitted to the workhouse. In similar cases, the guardians of the workhouse ruthlessly hunted down husbands and forced them to pay for the upkeep of their wives; we do not know if this happened in the case of Pooley, but it would be surprising if an attempt was not made.

Another potential issue, which comes across in the Autobiography, was that Pooley had a creative relationship with the truth. For example, he admitted (as detailed in the Autobiography) altering his birth year so that he appeared younger to the Surrey authorities (contemporary cricket records gave his birthdate as 1843; he later claimed to have actually been born in 1838 — possibly to generate more sympathy for his financial plight in the late 1890s — but his real birth year was 1842). More importantly, he claimed to have been born in Surrey; his actual birthplace was Chepstow in Wales, meaning that he was not qualified to play for Surrey. And his own accounts of his various escapades are full of omissions, distortions and excuses so that even in cases where he had almost certainly been unjustly accused, his own defence was unconvincing. It is very possible that he was regarded by the authorities as untruthful and therefore untrustworthy.

The cumulative effect meant that when Pooley’s career went into decline in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and he ceased to be a regular Surrey player, his reputation cannot have been a good one. This would have even gone beyond the condescending idea that professionals were morally weak and irresponsible because Pooley had repeatedly broken rules and disregarded unofficial conventions. In 1883, he was granted a benefit by Surrey which raised over £400, but that was his final season in first-class cricket. The next two decades were unsettled ones. He and his family lived in a succession of houses, generally trending downwards in quality, and he tried a bewildering number of ways to earn a living. He tried coaching and umpiring, which were fairly conventional routes for former first-class players to follow in their later years, but he never succeeded in making enough money to survive, so he branched out into other areas. He tried gardening, being a cashier in a theatre, being a timekeeper on a building yard, joining the groundstaff of a cricket club and even working in a billiard saloon. Yet his decline continued.

In 1885, he wrote to Surrey asking for work, but none could be found for him. By 1890, he had been forced to seek poor relief from his parish, and it was arranged for him to be treated for rheumatic fever at the Royal Mineral Water Hospital in Bath; while there, his financial problems became public knowledge when a chance encounter with Pooley prompted someone to write a letter to The Sportsman. None too happy at suggestions that the county had abandoned Pooley, Surrey’s secretary Charles Alcock told that newspaper that since 1888, the county had provided Pooley with a weekly grant — first of ten, then fifteen shillings — to support him over the winter months until he could find cricketing work in the summer. The MCC also made it known that Pooley had been receiving support from the Cricketers’ Fund, a charity organisation that supported former professional cricketers. Generally, the public were sympathetic to tale of former players fallen on hard times, and the result was often a subscription or collection to help them. The reaction by Surrey and the MCC in Pooley’s case suggests that they thought he was trying to deceive people or to exaggerate the nature of his plight. Perhaps he was, but it is an interesting contrast to the reaction in Yorkshire when Pullin publicised the difficulties of former Yorkshire players.

In fairness, Surrey had provided Pooley with support, making various grants and allowances to him for ten years, albeit sometimes contingent on his “good behaviour”. But for unknown reasons, they cut off all financial help at the end of 1894. Around the same time, he seems to have separated from Minnie Sabine, who by 1902 had married a man called John Stuckley. From that point, he was on his own and life became even harder.

The site of Lambeth Workhouse (Image: Essential History)

He endured prolonged spells in the workhouse, the miserable destination of many of the poor who could not support themselves. This is not the place to discuss workhouses, but while they provided grim shelter and the meagrest food, they were designed to humiliate their inmates, who had to undertake strenuous work. Men, for example, were expected to break up stones. It was the place of absolute last resort, when the only alternative was homelessness, but it says much for workhouse regimes that many people preferred living on the streets.

Although Pooley was not the only professional cricketer to end his days in the workhouse, he was the only one who ever discussed his time there. In the late 1890s, he explained how he came to be in the workhouse, blaming “bad health and bad luck”. He told Pullin that it was a case of “the workhouse, sir, or the river.” He first entered a workhouse in 1890 when suffering from rheumatism. After he recovered, he was able to work to support himself financially, but in his account, the abrupt cessation of Surrey’s allowance made a big difference, and when he lost his job during another bout of rheumatic fever, his health declined and he was soon “penniless”. He wrote how he did not want to ask his family for help — there is some evidence that they had effectively cut all contact with him, possibly owing to his relationship with Sabine — so he spent a night on the streets before entering Lambeth Workhouse. Although he was able to leave for a time, he was soon forced back. Workhouse records suggest that he was homeless by this stage of his life. He said in an interview in 1898: “It is a sad state of affairs, but I am as comfortable as rheums and workhouse regulations permit … I am out of the world here, you see, and can only smoke my pipe and dream of better days. I admit I have had my faults, and may, perhaps, have been a bit to blame, but …” And at that point, he tailed off and the interview ended. The interviewer, Frederick Gale, explained: “Then he muttered something, and it was hardly fair to ask him to speak clearly. Those who know Pooley know his story.” Yet “a bit to blame” hardly suggests that Pooley was plagued by regret for his own actions.

In later years, he again appealed unsuccessfully to Surrey, asking the county to find him employment. Surrey also refused a third-party request to provide him a pension. He continued to ask intermittently, but spent the final years of his life in and out of workhouses. He had various addresses in this period, including the Duchy of Cornwall Public House, but it is unclear if he lived at any of them permanently when out of the workhouse. He died in 1907 and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

The question of whether Pooley’s final years were a result of his own behaviour, his apparent abandonment by Surrey or the entire social system of Victorian England is perhaps unanswerable. He was not unusual in the sense that many professionals found life an intolerable struggle. Nor was he unique in the way that he was cut off by Surrey. If his behaviour over the years might suggest an explanation for Surrey’s loss of patience, it would not account for the county’s similar treatment of their former player Richard Humphrey, who was given £10 in relief by Surrey in 1890, and for a few years paid him six shillings a week to assist him. But this aid suddenly ended in 1894; having lived in poverty for several years, Humphrey killed himself in 1906. Surrey’s lack of sympathy was not a result of lack of funds; they paid their professionals very generously and managed to supply some amateurs, such as Walter Read, with an extremely generous allowance.

There were countless professionals with similar stories; some were as talented as Pooley and a very small number (largely thanks to A. W. Pullin) were able to have their stories heard in print before their deaths. Maybe none of Pooley’s individual problems were unique, but it might have been the combination — the gambling, the insubordination, the temper and the gamesmanship — which made him too unpalatable for the authorities. But even respectable professionals were similarly left to their fate when counties cut off their money; perhaps Pooley was simply a victim of the time, one of the generation of professionals culled to allow for the amateur domination of cricket.

Maybe Pooley was to blame for some of his problems, but maybe some were just a feature of cricket — and society — in the late-nineteenth century. If he was in some ways an unsympathetic character, was that simply because he refused to accept the place determined for him by those in authority? Because he insisted that he spoke for himself? At least that has value for the historian because there could have been countless other professionals like Pooley, but they never had a chance to tell their story. Which makes Pooley more than just a solitary “cautionary tale”; he becomes the voice of all the other lost tales.

The final word should perhaps go to Sir Home Gordon. After Pooley’s death in 1907, he wrote in Badminton Magazine that “to see him in shabby clothes, with grizzly-white hair, and a strained, sordid appearance, gazing at the Oval on the scene of his former triumphs, was pitiable. Yet no-one could help him because he would not help himself, and his careless, calamitous life ended in the Lambeth Infirmary.” But the most revealing point in the article was Gordon’s emphasis that professionals in 1907 were vastly morally superior to Pooley’s contemporaries. Because for men like Gordon, the problem was not particularly with Pooley the individual; it was with an entire class of cricketer.

“Calm Superiority”: The Quiet Success of Frank Martin

Frank Martin (Image: State Library of South Australia)

The first two men to score Test centuries for the West Indies were Clifford Roach and George Headley; both received great acclaim in later years when the West Indies had become the best team in the world. The latter in particular was revered as one of the greatest batters of all time. The third centurion for the West Indies had a more modest career, but played a crucial role in the first overseas win by the West Indies. In the final Test of a gruelling tour of Australia in 1930–31, having lost the first four games in the series, the West Indies managed a tense victory assisted by helpful conditions and two daring declarations. Headley was the key figure with a dominant century in the first innings and 30 runs in the second. But playing a much more defensive role, Frank Martin scored 123 not out and 20. He also took crucial wickets, recording match figures of four for 111 in 45 overs, including the vital one of Stan McCabe to end a partnership that threatened to win the game for Australia in the fourth innings. Yet few people today remember Martin. It did not help that he played alongside some famous names — Headley, Roach and Learie Constantine — as well as cricketers who were very well respected at the time (albeit similarly forgotten today) such as George Francis and Herman Griffith. Nor was Martin ever a player who would draw the crowds; his value lay in his dependability and calmness in a crisis.

Frank Reginald Martin was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 12 October 1893. Little is known about his early life except that his father’s name was George Alexander Martin. He attended Jamaica College, where he performed well academically. At some stage, he worked an assistant in the Registry of the Collector General’s Office. In 1921, by which time he was working as an accountant, Martin married Myrtle Elise McCormack, with whom he had two children: Rona Dorothea Martin (born in 1924) and Frank Reginald Martin (born in 1926). By the time his children were born, Martin had begun to work as a clerk with the United Fruit Company, a job he continued for many years. When he twice visited England with the West Indies cricket team, travel documents listed him as a clerk (in 1928) and a cashier (in 1933).

Only vague details are available about Martin’s early cricket. He played for Melbourne Cricket Club in Jamaica, but he did not have the opportunity to play at a higher level for a long time. No first-class cricket was played in Jamaica between 1911 — when an MCC team toured the Caribbean — and 1925, when Barbados visited to play three matches. By the time of the latter tour, Martin was among the leading players in Jamaica and he was selected as an all-rounder batting at number four. Against the extremely strong Barbados team — undefeated in the Intercolonial Tournament played between Barbados, Trinidad and British Guiana since 1910 — Martin scored 195 out of Jamaica’s 411 for eight declared, therefore recording a century on his first-class debut. He was less effective with the ball, bowling 26 wicketless overs as the visiting team demonstrated their batting ability in a reply of 426 for two as the match was drawn.

Martin was less successful in the other two games, and failed to take a wicket (although he bowled only nine overs in each match), but Jamaica just about held on, and both games were draws, albeit favouring Barbados. But Martin had been able to demonstrate that he could succeed at first-class level, and retained his place when a strong MCC team played three first-class matches against Jamaica in 1926. He scored 66 in the first game (as well as taking four for 44 in the second innings), 44 in the second and 80 in the third. His success against English teams continued in 1927, when against a touring side led by Lionel Tennyson, the former England captain, he scored an unbeaten 204, at the time the highest innings for Jamaica in first-class cricket . He was also used as a left-arm spinner; although he took few wickets, he was generally economical (for example in the match in which he scored a double century, he had figures of 35–15–36–0 in the first innings). And when another team by Tennyson visited Jamaica the following year (when George Headley surpassed Martin’s record by scoring 211), he scored an unbeaten 65 in the first match, while in the third his scores were 63 and 141 not out.

By the time of the final games on that tour, Martin was occasionally opening the batting, but he often batted at number four or lower. In his 65 not out, he batted at number nine. Part of the reason for his variable batting position was the nature of his job with the United Fruit Company. He generally did not take time off for cricket, but had an arrangement by which he would work in the mornings before a cricket match. If the team was batting first, he would stay at work until the lunch interval unless the captain telephoned him because wickets had fallen early. In that case, he drove to the ground (usually he was already wearing his cricket whites) so that he could bat if required.

Martin was one of the most reliable batters for Jamaica, particularly before the emergence of Headley. A left-hander, he batted patiently and had an excellent defence, although he was able to punish any loose deliveries. As a slow bowler, he often delivered long accurate spells while other bowlers rotated at the other end. He was regarded as a good fielder, particularly to his own bowling, and a good runner between the wickets. He was also one of the key advisors to the Jamaican captain, Karl Nunes. From 1926 until 1947, he was also one of the selectors for Jamaica. But his reputation as a “stonewaller” meant that there was some criticism of his play; he was sensitive to complaints that he scored too slowly. One lifelong friend recalled in an obituary how Martin once showed him a chart of his scoring rates that proved he was “always ahead of the clock” in scores of 25 or more.

The West Indies team that toured England in 1928; Martin is standing fourth from the left in the back row

For all these concerns, Martin was a certain selection for the 1928 tour of England by the West Indies team. Followers of cricket in the West Indies (and in England) hoped that the visitors would build on their impressive 1923 tour, and an equally effective display against the 1926 MCC team that toured the Caribbean. Owing to the growing reputation of West Indian cricket, the team had been awarded Test status and the 1928 tour would incorporate their first matches at that level. As one of the most solid batters in the Caribbean, and with the possible advantage of being a left-hander, Martin had the potential to shore up a batting line-up that was heavy with stroke-players, and was familiar with the team captain, his fellow Jamaican Karl Nunes. But there were problems with the selection of the team: Nunes was not a universally popular choice as leader and when the first-choice wicket-keeper George Dewhurst withdrew from the tour, the captain was forced to take the gloves full-time; and because Victor Pascall, a successful member of the 1923 team, had lost form through a combination of age and illness, the team lacked a proven spinner. It was hoped that Martin could fill that particular breach, but he had never been a front-line bowler.

Previews of the tour identified Martin as good batter. For example, The Cricketer described him as: “A left-hander whose batting may well prove to be a feature of the coming tour. Can hit well and has strong defence.” He largely justified such predictions, but the tour was a disaster for the West Indies. The three Tests against England were each lost by an innings, and the batting proved completely unreliable, particularly against spin. Martin was one of the few to enhance his reputation. He took time to find his form, and scored just one half-century in the first month of the tour, but innings of 56 against Ireland and 81 against the Minor Counties got him going in June. He scored a non-first-class century against the Civil Service, fifties in consecutive matches against Lancashire and Yorkshire, and towards the end of the tour scored 165 against Hampshire and 82 against Kent. He was fairly consistent — he reached double figures 32 times in 46 first-class innings — even though Nunes (perhaps aware of his versatility because they played together for Jamaica) constantly shifted Martin’s batting position. He most often opened or batted at number three, but there seemed to be no settled plan, which perhaps reflected the unreliable nature of the team’s batting.

Martin run out for 21 in the second Test against England at Manchester in 1928; A. P. Freeman can be seen in the act of throwing the ball from mid-on. The other batter was Clifford Roach and this misunderstanding began a collapse from 100 for one to 206 all out. (Image: Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 28 June 1928)

Martin had one of the best batting records for the West Indies. In the Test matches, he was solid: although his highest score was only 44, he scored 175 runs in six innings at 29.16, which placed him at the top of the West Indies Test averages (among those who batted more than twice) and he was comfortably the leading scorer. In all first-class cricket, his final record — 1,370 first-class runs at an average of 32.62, with eight fifties and the one century — placed him third in the team averages, and he was the second-highest run-scorer (he was the leading run-scorer if non-first-class games were taken into account). He was less effective with the ball — 19 first-class wickets at 44.89 — but offered useful support to the main bowlers.

His statistical success was backed up by the positive impression he made on English writers. The Wisden review of the tour praised him: “Martin, a left-hander, was probably the most difficult man on the side to dismiss. He watched the ball closely, and played back very hard, while on occasion his steady left-handed slow bowling helped to keep down the runs. He had a happier personal experience in the Test Matches than any of his colleagues, being only once out for less than 20, and never for a single figure.” The Cricketer was similarly complimentary: “Martin and Roach, so far as the Test matches go, were the best batsmen. Martin is a very sound left-hander, with a good defence, strong on the leg side, and a cool head … Both these men appeared to play with far more confidence than the rest of their colleagues, with the exception of Constantine”.

However, J. N. Pentelow, writing about the tour twelve months later in Ayres Cricket Companion, said: “Martin was easily the most consistent bat on the side. He is nothing like what [George] Challenor was in 1923; but what had been said of his steadiness and imperturbability was fully justified. He would go on for hours playing the safety game, waiting for the easy one to hit. But a batsman of his parts should not do so much of the pendulum business. Time after time his bat met the ball, only to send it to the bowler or to mid-off. It would pay him to take more risk. Yet one is sure that in the game he played he was considering the interests of his side.” After listing Martin’s highest scores, Pentelow concluded: “But he ought to have made more.” Writing in Cricket and I (1933), Learie Constantine viewed Martin’s achievements more positively: “But if many failed [during the 1928 tour], certain men stood out as absolutely first-class cricketers. There was the calm superiority of Martin in county games and Tests, not a Challenor by any means but a master of defensive play.”

Martin had a quieter time when another English team — Sir Julien Cahn’s Eleven — toured Jamaica in 1929; he passed fifty just once. When another MCC team toured the West Indies in 1930, Martin only played in the final Test. This was not necessarily a reflection of his ability; for a combination of reasons, including a desire to keep down costs and a bias towards selections from the host nation, the West Indies selectors (which involved a different group of selectors for each Test) chose different captains for each Test and a total of 27 players in four Tests. When the MCC visited Jamaica, Martin scored an unbeaten 106 (in what transpired was his final appearance for Jamaica) and was picked for the final Test. In a high-scoring draw that had to be abandoned after nine days, Martin scored 33 and 24, although he took just one wicket in 54 overs.

The West Indies team that toured Australia in 1930–31. Back row: G. A. Headley, C. A. Roach, E. A. C. Hunte, F. I. de Caires, O. C. Scott, O. S. Wright, I. Barrow, E. L. St. Hill. Middle row: H. C. Griffith, L. N. Constantine, J. E. Scheult (assistant manager), G. C. Grant (captain), R. H. Mallett (manager), L. S. Birkett (vice-captain), F. R. Martin, E. L. Bartlett, G. N. Francis. Front row: J. E. D. Sealey (Image: State Library of South Australia)

Given his experience and his record for Jamaica, Martin was always a certainty for the West Indies team that toured Australia in 1930–31, even though he was 37 years old when it began. The tour was regarded as a success; although the playing record of the team was poor, they were popular with spectators and it was generally believed that they performed better than results indicated. Martin was not a success for the most part; The Cricketer considered him “disappointing”. He had several low scores in the early games, and when he did make a start, he was dismissed in the 20s and 30s. He did not reach fifty until the West Indies had been in Australia for over a month, and his unbeaten 79 came against a weak Tasmania team. Apart from a fifty against a “Victoria Country” team, he did not make another substantial score until hitting 56 in the return game against New South Wales in the penultimate match. By then, Australia had won the first four Tests (three by an innings and the other by ten wickets) without too much difficulty; Martin’s highest score had been 39. At times he was used quite heavily as a bowler, for example taking three for 35 in the first match against New South Wales, and bowling long spells in the first and third Tests. And in the fourth Test, he took three for 91 from 30.2 overs.

The visiting team had been surprised by the slow pace of the pitches in Australia, and as the tour drew to a conclusion, pleaded behind the scenes for something with more life so that they could play better cricket for the public. Coincidentally or not, the pitch for the final Test, played at Sydney, was faster and Martin finally found his form. Opening after the West Indies won the toss, he batted throughout the first day. He had George Headley had added 152 for the second wicket in 146 minutes, out of which Headley scored 105. Martin reached fifty from 96 deliveries in 102 minutes (with five fours), his first such score at Test level in his ninth game. But after that, he slowed down as Headley reached his century from 169 deliveries and faced most of the bowling. After Headley was dismissed, Martin played a similarly supporting role alongside his captain, Jackie Grant. Just before the close of play, Martin reached his century in 273 minutes from 288 deliveries (his second fifty had taken three hours and 192 deliveries) and finished the day on 100 not out, and the West Indies were 299 for two.

On the second day, he and Grant took their third wicket partnership to 110, out of which Grant scored 62. But rain fell to affect the pitch, and wickets fell rapidly. In this period, Martin excelled; Wisden noted: “He showed marked skill especially when the pitch was getting treacherous.” The increasingly sticky pitch prompted Grant to declare with the total on 350 for six; Martin was left unbeaten on 123 not out (after 347 minutes). He was quickly into the attack and in the helpful conditions removed Bill Woodfull and Donald Bradman before the end of play, when Australia were 89 for five. In easier batting conditions after the Sunday rest day, Australia recovered to 224 but still conceded a first-innings lead of 126. However, more rain again made run-scoring difficult and the West Indies struggled to 124 for five at the close of the third day. Martin had again opened, but could only manage 20 runs.

Frank Martin batting in the nets at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1930–31 (Image: Wikipedia)

Rain completely washed out the fourth day, and the prospect of further difficult conditions persuaded Grant to declare on the overnight total, leaving Australia needing 251 to win; because Australian Test matches were played to a finish, there was no time limit for Australia to score the runs, and this was the first time in an Australian Test that any captain had declared both of his team’s innings closed. Martin again struck early, removing Bill Ponsford, and Australia were soon 76 for six. But Alan Fairfax and Stan McCabe added 79 for the seventh wicket; Martin had McCabe caught, but runs continued to come and the touring team became a little nervy before the last man was run out to give the West Indies a 30-run win. It was their first overseas victory in a Test match and when combined with the teams win over New South Wales in the immediately preceding match meant that the tour ended well, and the result was acclaimed both by the Australian crowds and back at home in the Caribbean.

Martin ended the tour with 606 first-class runs at 27.54 and 21 wickets at 45.23. In the Tests, he scored 254 runs at 28.22 and took seven wickets at 64.00. But the match at Sydney was his final Test. After the tour, when he had returned home, Martin announced (at a dinner given by the Jamaica Cricket Association in honour of the Jamaican members of the touring team) that he felt he had to retire from representative cricket. Stating that his employers, the United Fruit Company, had been very generous in allowing him time off to tour, he felt that he owed it to “give them of his best services without interruption.” Therefore when another team organised by Lionel Tennyson visited Jamaica in 1931–32, Martin was absent.

Nevertheless, he was not quite done and would probably have played more Tests but for injury. After what was likely some behind-the-scenes negotiations, he was chosen for the West Indies team that toured England in 1933. As he was 39, his selection was not universally popular and in some quarters he was described as a “has-been”. A preview in The Cricketer noted that his selection had been a surprise but noted his steadiness and ability on the “big occasion”, although it was critical of his fielding. He began the tour steadily, and scored a first-class fifty against Oxford University. But when playing against Middlesex in early June, he suffered a leg injury while chasing the ball. It was so serious that he was unable to play again on the tour, and therefore that match was his final appearance in first-class cricket. His absence affected the balance of the team, and Wisden noted: “The loss of such a valuable all-round man could not fail to be very severely felt.” C. L. R. James, writing in the Manchester Guardian at the end of the 1933 season, suggested that Martin’s absence made the team vulnerable to collapse and meant that there was no-one to counter the leg-spin bowling and slow-left-arm bowling against which the batters generally struggled.

Nevertheless, Martin remained with the team until the end of the tour (he acted as the team scorer in at least one match) and as had been the case on the 1928 tour was joined by his wife towards the end; they travelled home together with the rest of the side.

Martin’s final career figures were respectable: 3,589 first-class runs (at 37.77), 74 first-class wickets (at 42.55), 486 Test runs (at 28.58) and 8 Test wickets (at 77.37) in nine matches for the West Indies. In 15 matches for Jamaica, he scored 1,262 runs at 70.11, including four centuries (with one on each of his first and last appearances for the team).

The rest of his life was lived away from the spotlight; a friend called him “reticent and quiet”. When discussing cricket, he always advised people to “play their natural game”. He continued to work for the United Fruit Company, and later founded the Unifruitee Senior Cup Club cricket competition. Little else is known of him or his life. His wife died at the age of 57 in 1950 of arteriosclerosis and cerebral thrombosis. Martin died in Kingston in 1967, at the age of 74, from a coronary thrombosis. There is probably a lot more that could be said of him, but like so many of his contemporaries in the West Indies, he remains a mystery except in his achievements on the cricket field.

The Englishman in Spokane: Legend, Reality and Charles Absolom

Charles Absolom in 1876 (Image: The Cricketer, August 1989)

Charles Absolom, who came from a wealthy family, played cricket for Cambridge University and Kent. He also played one Test match from England. But if he was extremely popular with friends (who included Lord Harris and Charles Alcock) and team-mates, and if no-one ever seems to have had a bad word to say about him, he was never a leading cricketer. What sets Absolom apart is the abrupt and mysterious end to his cricketing career, and the way he spent the remainder of his life. After playing for Kent against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge on 25 and 26 August 1879, Absolom vanished from the records — and entirely from the sight of the cricket world — and did not reappear until his untimely death ten years later when it transpired that he had been living in the United States. No-one knew for certain why Absolom left England, but there is evidence from a memoir written by Mary Vivian Hughes in 1936 that he had been rejected by a woman called Ann (“Tony”) Vivian; heartbreak might have prompted him to start a new life, and it appears that some of his friends believed this to have been the reason. On the other hand, Absolom had suffered three bereavements in a short time: his father and brother died in 1878, while his close friend Tom Thomas, with whose family Absolom spent an enormous amount of time, died mysteriously in 1879. Perhaps these factors persuaded him to make a fresh start. But in the end, we don’t know why Absolom left England. However, we can discover a surprising amount about his life in the United States, what he did there, and the events which led to his death at Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in a tragic accident onboard a ship early in 1889.

It was only after his death that details emerged in England about what he had spent the last ten years doing. The most widely circulated story — printed in many British newspapers in August 1889, originated from New York (possibly from the New York Herald) — said that after Absolom “broke loose from the ties and associations which bound him to England, he bought a rifle and a dog, and buried himself in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. The reasons for this course he never gave. Some said it was a love affair, and that explanation was generally accepted.” But this report (and a few similar ones) bears a few signs of heated imagination: “He fled from civilisation and became the friend and trusted counsellor of many Indian [i.e. Native American] chiefs. The tribes in Montana and through the Columbian Valley knew him and loved him. The Spokanes adopted him into the tribe, giving him an unpronounceable name, signifying in English ‘the man who never wears a hat’ derived from a habit he acquired before leaving England.” This was unquestioningly accepted at the time — even though the notion of Native Americans “adopting” a white European was already something of a cliché — and has been parroted ever since. Even distinguished names such as Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Mike Atherton have been beguiled into repeating the legend in print.

Even putting aside the fantastical “Boy’s Own” nature of the story, there are other issues. By the time Absolom reached the United States, Native Americans (including the Spokane peoples) had been forcibly confined to reservations after a long period of struggle. The romanticised idea of Absolom wondering through Montana or the Columbia Valley (both of which are in the extreme north-west of the United States) was little more than a nostalgic throwback to an earlier time. Nor did anyone think to ask the obvious question: if the late Charles Absolom had been living this life of isolation, how did the writer learn about it? Quite simply, this “biography” of Absolom was an invention that grew into an accepted legend in the absence of any other information.

The safest course is to discount all these unattributed tales. As we shall see, there are reliable accounts of his final years and we can be fairly certain of what he was doing between 1887 and his death in 1889. But this leaves a substantial gap between 1880 and 1887. Absolom’s whereabouts in this period seem to have been completely unknown to his English friends and contemporaries. But if he never publicised his whereabouts, it seems that he was not intentionally hiding because it is possible to tell an almost complete story of what Absolom was doing during those years. The first clue comes with his appearance on the 1880 United States census, which recorded him living in Charlottesville in Virginia on 8 and 9 June 1880, where he was staying with an Australian-born 38-year-old farmer called James Harris, listed as the latter’s friend. There are no indications of how he got there, nor what he was doing in Virginia; the census recorded that he was not working. But we can pick up his trail three years later, when we quickly begin to see how the legends might have accumulated about his activities in the United States.

Absolom was neither living the life of an adventurer in the Rockies, nor spending time with Native Americans, nor hunting “with a rifle and a dog”. In reality, Absolom had settled in the embryonic city then known as Spokane Falls but today known simply as Spokane, Washington. Clearly someone had muddled the city with the Native American people; and from there came the legend of his time in the “wilderness”. The reality was more mundane; rather than living a romantic life, Absolom had grasped an opportunity to make money. Yet there are hints that this reality was in some ways no less dramatic than the legend.

Spokane Falls had been established in 1871 with the building of a sawmill. By 1880, a nearby fort had been built by the U. S. Army and the city was connected to the Northern Pacific Railway in mid-1881; by the end of November that year, Spokane had been officially incorporated as a city, with a population of around 1,000. The influx of workers and the expansion driven by the new railway meant that the population grew rapidly — by 1888, over 8,000 people lived there. As a result, land was an extremely valuable commodity; property brokers stood to make a considerable profit. And one of these property brokers was an Englishman called Charles Alfred Absolom.

A map of Spokane Falls published in 1890 (Image: Wikipedia)

By 1883, Absolom was advertising in the Spokane Falls Review (a local newspaper) as a real estate agent, with an office at the corner of Mill Street and Riverside Avenue. He had initially been in a partnership with a man called L. N. Van Vranken, but after the men went their separate ways in October 1883, he set up a new business with a man called W. H. Maxwell, an experienced surveyor. Absolom had bought up huge swathes of land in Spokane — later reports said that he paid just one dollar per acre — which he sold over the following years; like so many aspects of his life, it is a mystery where his money came from. Perhaps it was an inheritance from his father. Later events might indicate that he received a loan from a local businessman. But we do not know.

Absolom’s advertising did not lack confidence. For example, he offered “business property in the best parts of the city”, “the most desirable residence lots yet put on the market”, “farms improved and unimproved, within easy distance of town”, and “places for either business or residence for rent”. By the end of 1883, he was also offering loans and investments, and was willing to “locate parties” and make claims. He was clearly a big name in the property business; in 1885, he had a full-page advertisement in the Settlers’ Guide to Homes in the Northwest: Handbook of Spokane Falls for “Absolom and Maxwell” (now located on the corner of Riverside Avenue and Post Street), which offered a list of potential investments and a map of Spokane. If the suggestion that he paid just a dollar per acre was accurate, his profits must have been enormous. By 1884, Absolom and Maxwell were selling lots priced between $80 and $250, and offering whole blocks at $1,000 each.

As well as accumulating wealth, Absolom threw himself into the life of the growing city. Local newspapers eagerly reported stories about leading residents, and Absolom was certainly one of those. For example, in 1883 it was reported that he had made a point of collecting vegetables growing in the locality and displaying them to show what could be grown in the area. In 1884, he was a prominent name in an organisation formed to preserve game which was in danger of being over-hunted. He even showed some of his old athletics prowess, accepting a challenge in 1885 whereby he had to race another man over fifty yards; but as news had reached Spokane of his youthful sporting feats (the Spokane Review noted that he had been “one of the best all round athletes in merry England” during his college days), he had to run backwards (with a ten yards head start) while his opponent ran normally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Absolom lost. Nor were his cricketing skills forgotten; in 1884 he took part in a match between Portland and Victoria. And he was also a leading figure among other British residents of Spokane; in 1886 he was the “president” of a dinner that the group organised in honour of Queen Victoria.

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Riverside Avenue, Spokane, where Absolom had offices in the 1880s. The date of the photograph is uncertain but it was probably taken in the 1890s, when the city had been remodelled after the Great Spokane Fire in 1889

Although the later legends that Absolom lived a life of adventure in the Rockies were not entirely true, he did have some brushes with excitement. In August 1883, he embarked on a trip with Dr J. Whitman in which their rig collided with a tree after the two horses opted to go different ways around it; a report in the Spokane Review (which in later years was retitled to the Spokesman Review) revealed that Absolom repaired the vehicle himself. In 1885, the Spokane Evening Review reported that Absolom had been injured when the horse he was riding became frightened and set off at a gallop; afraid that it might run into a river, he jumped off but struck his head on rocks. The resulting gash required stitches, and he had to spend some time in the “college building” under the care of a doctor. His later recovery was ascribed to his being “as solid in flesh and bone as he ever was. Absolom is as tough as a cast-iron man, as few could have passed through the experience he did without breaking every bone in their bodies.” And in 1886, Spokane’s Morning Review reported that Absolom and a man called W. A. Harvey had returned home after “spending two or three weeks vagabonding up on the headwaters of the Little Spokane. The two started out one day on foot without blankets and with only what provisions and the few necessary articles they could conveniently carry. Thus supplied they succeeded in putting in the time as stated, lounging about the forest and along the streams in the neighborhood they visited just enjoying a quiet rest. Mr Harvey states that he had a delightful time of it.”

Nevertheless, there were a few question marks over Absolom’s health. The Morning Review reported in January 1886 that he “has been laid up with rheumatism for several weeks, [but] is very much better and his friends expect to see him out again in a very few days.” Just over a fortnight later, it revealed that he was once more out in public, but ascribed a different illness as the reason. Rather than rheumatism, it had been a “long siege with the gout” which had left him indisposed. Furthermore: “The confinement told on him, as he looks as though he had lost considerable flesh. He has suffered a great deal with the attack.” It is not clear exactly what was happening here, but something might have been going on behind the scenes because, later that year, Absolom suddenly vanished from Spokane.

In November 1886, the Morning Review reported: “The general impression is that C. A. Absolom, the well-known Englishman who was spent several years in this city, has gone back to England. He has talked of making a trip to his native land for some time, and those who know him best think he left the city for that purpose. We make mention of this as there are a number of rumors in circulation reflecting upon the motives that lead to his departure. We have always believed him to be perfectly honorable, a man among men, and feel confident that he will return or at least will be heard from in due time.” Unfortunately, the article did not specify the nature of the rumours, nor why some residents of Spokane might have needed reassurance that he was “perfectly honorable”. Nor does it appear that his friends in Spokane heard anything from him again.

Another curious update appeared in the Spokane Falls Review in January 1887: “The many friends of A. C. Absolom [sic] will be pleased to learn that he made a quarter of a million dollars in real estate in this city by buying land at one dollar an acre and selling on a booming market. This information comes from an English acquaintance of Mr Absolom in Chicago.” Why was he in Chicago? Who was this acquaintance?

And the mystery deepens. In May 1887 a notice appeared in the Spokane Review from the Sheriff of Spokane County proclaiming that a court had upheld a claim from John N. Squier against Absolom for $170, plus ten per cent interest and costs of $38.60. Although no explanation was given, the sheriff announced he would auction two of Absolom’s lots to pay off Squier. That November, notices appeared in court listings of a civil case between Squier and Absolom, but no details emerged in the press.

Squier was a notable figure in Spokane; he owned a saloon and offered fittings to those who wished to establish their own bars. He sold cigars and liquor, and was the part-owner of a silver mine. After Absolom’s departure, he also opened a hotel. He was clearly a man of wealth. While his relationship with Absolom is unclear, he clearly had a grievance because the archives in Spokane still hold a file on the case between the men which runs to 33 pages (mainly of legal discussion). Although there is little within the pages that explains what happened — for example it contains details of the sale of Absolom’s land by the Sheriff but no narrative — a brief note mentions that Absolom owed Squier $170 “on an account for goods and merchandise sold and delivered” from February 1884 onwards. Why did he need to buy items on credit from Squier? The amount owed would be worth over $5,000 today (equivalent to over £4,000); was Absolom’s business less lucrative than he claimed?

Perhaps this explains the illnesses of Absolom, and his mysterious departure from Spokane in late 1886. Was he heavily in debt? If he had borrowed money to purchase land, that is certainly possible. But if he had sold plots at the prices advertised, he would surely have paid off what he owed. And what of the reports that he had made “a quarter of a million dollars”? Was his business built on smoke and mirrors? When he left, was he fleeing from more financial problems than simply those connected to Squier? Or was this more serious, and was he guilty of some kind of fraud? As usual, we do not know. But there was clearly a cloud over his departure. And Absolom never returned to Spokane: he still had unclaimed letters at the Post Office in February 1888, because he was included in a list of “unclaimed mail” published that month.

What happened next? Absolom certainly England in 1887; after his death, Charles Alcock described in Cricket how Absolom had appeared unexpectedly at the annual meeting of the county secretaries in 1887, “to the great delight of his many friends there”. Lord Harris also later related how Absolom had stayed with him for a few days during this visit; “although he was always reticent of his own affairs, I learned a good deal of the life he had been living in Washington Territory, U. S. Why he went there I never knew, but being there, I know that he pursued the same straightforward, kind-hearted course that made him so many friends in the old country.” Given what we know about Absolom’s apparently hurried departure from Spokane, it is tempting to wonder if Harris had learned some of the details and was indirectly attempting to defend his old friend from any rumours which might have followed him. Or perhaps Absolom had spun a tale of living in the Rockies, with the Spokane people, to disguise the less heroic truth and sow the seeds of the story that was told after his death.

Staten Island Cricket Club (Image: via Facebook)

Mary Hughes also referred to this visit to England in Vivians (her 1936 pseudo-biography of her mother and aunt), although she made clear that Absolom never visited her family. She speculated that he had tried to visit Tom Thomas, only to find that he no longer lived in the old house. And that “something or other that was disappointing or uncongenial in England sent him back immediately to the West Indies”. However, this was largely an event of her own imagination; it implied that Absolom was unaware of Thomas’ death, but this seems unlikely. And neither Hughes nor her family saw Absolom after 1879, so they could not have asked him personally.

Rather than return to Spokane (or to the West Indies as Hughes believed), Absolom headed for New York after leaving England. There is a record of a Charles Absolom sailing from Liverpool to New York in 1887. Alcock had also been told that Absolom had recently played cricket for the Staten Island Club, and the database at CricketArchive contains several matches that Absolom played for that team between June and September 1888. He also played for Seabright Cricket Club in New Jersey; he took part in the team’s brief tour of Canada during August 1888. After his death, an article appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette (it described him, inaccurately, as a “briefless barrister” who had been “pioneering in the wild Washington Territory” and as “a bit of a journalist”) which said: “I remember he had charge of a cricket ground at Staten Island, where he was teaching the American idea how to cricket [sic].”

The biggest mystery to those who knew Absolom in England concerned what he was doing at the time of his death, when he was working as a purser aboard a mail boat operating between New York and the Caribbean. Benny Green, who was fascinated by Absolom, put this very effectively in an article for The Cricketer in 1980: “Quite apart from the inexplicable fact of his disappearance from England, how does a paragon of the Victorian amateur tradition, a young blood who has represented his varsity and the Gentlemen, how does so well-appointed a sprig end up shifting bananas in the colonies?” This question, which must have so baffled contemporaries, probably accounts for the implausible tales of a life of adventure; only through such escapades could a respectable Englishman come to be faced with such lowly circumstances. It must have been his own choice!

The solution was found (or perhaps manufactured) in Absolom’s supposed days of adventure; the New York newspaper report (the one that claimed he lived with the Spokane people) stated: “While hunting in the Rockies he fell from a ledge, receiving injuries which forced him to New York for treatment.” According to this version, a doctor advised Absolom to take a sea voyage to aid his recovery, and therefore he decided to take a role as a purser on a ship called the Orinoco which travelled between New York and Bermuda. Hughes had heard a similar version, with which she concluded the chapter called “Charlie” in Vivians. A friend of hers (who had briefly known Absolom) heard many years later that he had been injured in a fall, and a “white wanderer in the Rockies” heard that “another white man” was hurt and took him into a hospital. But this story was likely the same one related in the 1889 newspaper article.

Unfortunately for the legend, this story cannot be true as Absolom had visited England after leaving “the Rockies”; if he had been advised to take a sea voyage (which is not impossible given his poor health — whether gout, rheumatism or financial stress — as his time in Spokane drew to a close), this would have been adequately fulfilled by his trip home. But it neatly accounted for his presence in New York and his work on a ship. The reality must have been considerably different. However, there is some circumstantial support for part of the story: the suggestion he worked as a purser on the Orinoco. This was a ship with the Quebec Line; and we know that Absolom was a purser on another Quebec Line ship at the time of his death. Does this mean that after arriving in New York, he began working for that company, and played cricket when not on duty? Given what we now know of his course through the United States — and his probable financial disgrace — it is perhaps not surprising that he spent his final years quietly working in such a way, where he would not be recognised and where any potential creditors could not pursue him. And as the Quebec Line operated between Canada and the Caribbean, this might offer an explanation of how he came to tour Canada with a cricket team in 1888.

There is one final trace of Absolom, as related by the friend of Hughes in his letter. This story is far more reliable as it concerned the writer’s first-hand experience. He had met Absolom while stationed with his regiment in Bermuda. The regimental cricket team played Hamilton Town Cricket Club, for whom Absolom was playing incognito as “Smith or Brown or Jones”. He hit a rapid and brutal fifty, and despite being stiff and non-too-fit, bowled out the opposition with the ball. The letter continued: “It then transpired that ‘Smith’ was purser of the mail-boat which had arrived that morning from New York, and came every alternate Saturday.”

Soon after his cricket match in Bermuda, Absolom switched to another mail route, between New York and the West Indies. Some obituary reports claimed that Absolom wished to see the West Indies, and he supposedly became very popular there, “welcomed wherever there was a wicket.” And these reports once again drifted away from fact and into uncorroborated legend. One newspaper in Philadelphia noted how he had slept on the deck, fully dressed and bareheaded, was something “no West Indian would dare to do”. It also noted, in similar fashion, of how many years earlier he “became the talk” of Australia when playing there bareheaded, when “not even a native was capable of performing such a feat”. These claims are more likely to be based on a desire by the writers to demonstrate the hardiness of a white Englishman compared to “natives” than an accurate account of anything Absolom did.

A cigarette card featuring the SS Muriel (Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

To return to the facts, Absolom’s new route was onboard the Muriel of the Quebec line. And on 27 July 1889 — according to Hughes’ correspondent, on his very first trip with his new ship — Absolom had a fatal accident. At Port-of-Spain in Trinidad, a cargo of sugar was being transferred aboard the Muriel when the derrick (crane) collapsed and fell on Absolom, who had been watching the process alongside another man (J. A. Dupont). Both men were crushed; Dupont died almost instantly, but Absolom survived for a time. He had been paralysed by either the crane itself of a falling spar, and could not be moved until the following day, when he was transferred to a Port-of-Spain hospital. Three days after the accident, during which he had been conscious but in considerable pain, Absolom died on 30 July 1889.

An early report, printed in Dominica, suggested that no-one in Port-of-Spain (presumably including his crew-mates on the Muriel) was fully aware of who Absolom was, except that he was referred to as a “gentleman and a polished scholar” in the Port of Spain Gazette; when he discovered that his injuries were fatal, he “refused any account of himself, and carried to the grave the secret of his identity.” According to the author, it was only after his death that Absolom’s identity was established, but no-one knew how he came to be a purser. If this was true — and his anonymous cricket career in Bermuda might suggest so — it adds to the impression of a man on the run — whether from whatever took place that caused him to leave England, or the problems that arose in Spokane that forced his departure, or something else entirely — who did not want to be recognised even as he lay dying.

News of Absolom’s death reached Spokane via newspaper reports. The Spokane Falls Review printed the New York article in later August 1889 and accepted it unquestioningly, even though some readers would have known some details were wrong. The introduction said that the reprinted account contained details of “the sudden death of Charles A. Absolom, who formerly lived in Spokane Falls and was well-known to the Indians around here as their friend.” The latter suggestion had never been hinted at in any previous reports originating from Spokane; perhaps that aspect was true, but it is equally likely that the writer just believed what appeared in the New York article.

News took time to travel to England, and it was Lord Harris who broke the news of Absolom’s death in mid-August 1889. Harris immediately wrote a tribute: “A generation of cricketers is short-lived: but though it is ten years since ‘Bos’ played his last match for the county, there must be thousands of onlookers who can remember what a safe pair of hands were his; what a successful, if not very difficult, bowler he was occasionally; what good service he did many a time in his own peculiar but vigorous style with the bat; and last, but not least, how he always played up for his side. At any rate, there are many lovers of the game in Kent who will gratefully remember the yeoman service he rendered the county from 1875 to 1879. I had the good fortune to be able to induce him to play for the county. It brought me more than a right sturdy comrade in the cricket-field: it brought me a sincere, true-hearted friend, whose early death I, and all who knew him, deeply deplore.”

Many reports noted his “wasted life and aimless wandering” in his final years without ever coming up with an explanation. Maybe close friends such as Lord Harris knew of his life in Spokane, but it never became public knowledge. The Thomas family were just as ill-informed as the rest of Absolom’s friends, having no explanation for his disappearance or why he had become a purser; they only learned of his death after Tom Thomas’ oldest son read the story in a newspaper.

Although Absolom is forgotten today — apart from his minor appearances in the record books for his one Test match and the dismissal for “obstructing the field” — we have perhaps a better outline of his life than any of his acquaintances managed, simply because he seems to have deliberately obscured the full picture from them. We also have just enough of a character sketch — given by the unlikely combination of Charles Alcock, Lord Harris, W. G. Grace, Mary Vivian Hughes and the newspaper writers of Spokane Falls — to understand hints of what kind of a man he might have been. Whoever he was, there is no doubt that he is one of the most extraordinary cricketers ever to have played in England, but one for whom the sport was but a small part of his life. Perhaps the best summary was provided in 1889 by “Mid-on” in the St James’s Gazette: writing of Absolom’s death, the writer called him “the popular but rather eccentric Kentish and Cambridge cricketer”.

Note: I am extremely grateful Dana Bronson of the Spokane Public Library and Breezy Hanson of the Spokane County Clerks Department Archives for their assistance with the file on Squier’s case against Absolom.