Despite the impressive progress made by colonial cricket in the 1870s and early 1880s, cricket in Australia experienced a regression in the late 1880s, a development amply documented by Montefiore’s Cricket in the Doldrums. 1 This waning was the result of two chief problems: firstly, intercolonial tension between New South Wales and Victoria , and secondly, tensions between the top players (that is, those players who had undertaken many of the previous tours to Britain) and cricket administrators. The exacerbation of these two factors in the late 1880s severely impaired the organisation and running of tours between Australia and Britain. Spofforth may even have offered a prescient comment on this development when he was asked in an interview in 1886 whether Australia would continue to send such high-quality opposition to tour Britain. He answered, ‘Cricketers, I think, come in cycles … [and] if you think my opinion worth repeating, it is that there are interregnums in cricket’. 2

A players’ strike in 1885 by the returning 1884 tourists, prompted by the Australian players demanding a larger cut of the gate money , meant that none of the five Test matches played on the 1885–1886 English tour of Australia fielded a full-strength Australian Eleven. These disagreements between colonial administrative authorities and leading players also marred the following 1886 tour of England . This was the first tour to be organised and funded by the Melbourne Cricket Club instead of the usual joint-stock enterprise of previous tours. It was conspicuously publicised as an ‘all-amateur’ affair and received the following glowing approbation from Lillywhite’s Annual :

The visit was invested with additional importance and it certainly appealed more forcibly to the sympathy of English cricketers, from the fact that it was made under the auspices and management of a body which had identified itself actively and closely with the cricket of the Old Country. Exception had been frequently, and with reason, taken to the principles on which the previous tours of Australian teams had been conducted. It was felt, and generally I think, that the best interests of the game were not consulted when the trip was a merely speculative undertaking on cooperative lines run by the players themselves, or a section of them, as a show. 3

Unfortunately, this encomium could not stop the tour from being, in the words of Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanac , ‘an emphatic failure; whether we regard it as an event of itself or compare it with previous visits to this country of the picked teams of the Australian colonies’. 4

Anglo-Australian cricket only went from bad to worse with two English teams touring Australia in competition with each other in 1887–1888. Shaw blamed this sorry state of affairs on intercolonial rivalry, with Victoria and New South Wales organising separate tours. 5 Unsurprisingly, both tours were a financial disaster. On 12 November 1887, ‘Felix’ (ex-Australian cricketer Tom Horan) in the Australasian compared the state of cricket in Britain—where it ‘was never so popular as it is now’—to that in Australia, where there had ‘been a very pronounced falling off of public support … during the last two or three seasons’. 6 The wrangles between Australian cricket’s administration and the players meant that the 1888 Australian side to tour Britain was forced to embark upon the tour without any preliminary matches against sanctioned colonial elevens. Lillywhite’s claimed that ‘never assuredly did a party of cricketers set out on an extensive tour under circumstances so thoroughly calculated to discourage as the Sixth Australian Team which has visited England ’. However, it’s not entirely clear whether this judgement was prompted more by the fact that the organisation and finances of the tour were once again in the hands of the players. 7 The scheduling of English tours to Australia then went from the one extreme to the other, with no tour taking place at all in the Australian summer of 1888–1889. And last, the 1890 Australian tour of Britain again had to make do without any preliminary matches against colonial elevens and ended up being the first Australian team to lose more matches than it won. The situation was so dire that instead of hailing the benefits that regular tours had on the health of cricketing relations (and British World relations generally), one observer in the Sydney Mail, in a peculiar echo of Spofforth’s terminology of four years before, pronounced that ‘in the interests alike of Australian and English cricket … there is a strong feeling that an interregnum of several years should now occur’. 8

It is against this backdrop of Australian cricket ‘in the doldrums’ that a plan was devised for W.G. Grace to once again undertake a cricket tour of Australia after a seventeen-year absence. The man who has been commonly accepted as the architect of this plan was the wealthy aristocrat and cricket enthusiast Lord Sheffield . According to the manager of the 1891–1892 English team, Alfred Shaw , the tour sought to bring ‘new life to Australian cricket’ and ‘re-solder, as it were, the links of affection and interest that bound cricketers in the Old Country and the Colonies together’. 9 Australia ended up winning two out of the three Tests with all three matches being very well patronised by the Australian public. For the first Test in Melbourne alone, 75,000 spectators paid to attend over the course of the match. 10 The Age reported that these kinds of attendance numbers had not been seen since the English tour of 1882–1883. 11

As evidenced by Shaw’s comments above, the tour had a couple of objectives. The first was to revitalise Australian cricket and, in so doing, resubstantiate British World cricketing bonds. In regards to the former, the tour was an immense success. The matches were very popular with the Australian public, a fact undoubtedly assisted by both the presence of W.G. and the success of the Australian team, and the consensus in the colonial press was that the tour overall had an extremely positive bearing on cricket in Australia. ‘Mid-On’ in the Age attributed this directly to Lord Sheffield: the tour ‘marked a most important epoch in the history of Australian cricket … Twelve months ago the suggestion of such a marvellous revival in the grand old game being probable or even possible would have been laughed to scorn, and therefore the cricketers of Australia cannot too sincerely thank Lord Sheffield for what he has accomplished’. ‘Felix’ concurred, reporting that the tour ‘gave a splendid and much-needed stimulus to cricket throughout Australia. That success acted like an electric current. Everybody talked cricket, everybody was roused to enthusiasm, everybody was delighted. Memories of disastrous defeats on English fields in 1890 died away’. 12 In regards to the ‘re-soldering’ of British World relations, Lord Sheffield , for his part, re-emphasised in his farewell speech the importance of regular cricket tours between Australia and the ‘Mother Country’ for British World amity and unity. 13

Lord Sheffield’s tour was also of some assistance in another important development—the organisation of a more regularised intercolonial domestic competition. At the start of the tour, Sheffield had communicated to Ben Wardill , secretary of the Melbourne Cricket Club , his desire to provide a trophy worth £150 for a formal competition between the three major cricket-playing colonies of New South Wales , Victoria and South Australia . The issue was taken up at the inaugural meeting of a new body designed to manage Australian cricket—the Australasian Cricket Council (ACC), the membership of which was composed of representatives from these three colonies. 14 It is sometimes thought that the formation of the ACC was also prompted by Lord Sheffield’s visit, but there had actually been talk of the need for such an organisation since at least 1890. On 15 November 1890, the Sydney Mail reported: ‘The New South Wales Cricket Association has decided to communicate with the other colonial associations, with a view to appoint an Australian Cricket Council on the lines of the English County Council’. 15 Obviously Sheffield was in support of such an idea and, indeed, remarked in his speech in Sydney on the necessity that future cricket tours be ‘undertaken with the unanimous concurrence and consent of the leading associations of Australia’. 16 When the ACC met for the first time in September 1892, they agreed on the need for the establishment of a formal intercolonial competition and that ‘the £150 offered by Lord Sheffield for promoting cricket in the colonies be devoted to the purchase of a shield, to be called the Sheffield Shield ’. 17 This shield would be awarded to the winner of an annual competition between the three member colonies of the ACC. The design of the shield neatly symbolised the Anglo-Australian origins of the competition, with the depiction of a batsman and a bowler beside a plate depicting Lord Sheffield’s personal cricket ground, Sheffield Park . It also bore the coat of arms of the earl next to the kangaroo and emu of Australia.

In words that were remarkably similar to those quotes describing the effect of the 1878 Australian tour of England , Shaw noted that Lord Sheffield’s tour ‘gave new life to Australian cricket, and opened out a new era for the game in the land of the Golden Fleece’. 18 But what did this new era look like? Would Australian cricket be able to maintain the unprecedented success and popularity of the 1891–1892 season without the drawcards of W.G. Grace and Sheffield himself? Secondly, and importantly for this study, was Lord Sheffield also successful in the other stated aim—the ‘re-soldering’ of British World relations? Certainly Sheffield’s tour had signified the continued importance of Anglo-Australian networks and there was much British World rhetoric surrounding the tour. But did this augur stronger British World connections and associations in the long term? And what would be the significance of this new era for the finely tuned balance of the mediated national identity in the years leading up to Federation ?

That the new era might be marked by continued success and organisational harmony was not immediately apparent for the next tour of the metropole. The 1893 team to visit England was riven with internal schisms with rumours of fights, catches deliberately dropped, drunkenness, and financial deception on the part of the team manager, Victor Cohen . This division off the field translated to poor performances on it, particularly when compared with the thrilling two-Tests-to-one defeat of Lord Sheffield’s team in Australia. From the three Tests, the Australians had to settle for two draws and a loss and ended up losing ten first-class matches in total. Furthermore, the friction evident between the players and Cohen, whom the players suspected of taking a cut of the profits for the benefit of the impecunious ACC , was indicative of future difficulties. 19

The calamities of the 1893 tour were soon forgotten when an England Eleven toured Australia in 1894–1895 . In a close-fought affair, England won the first Test by eleven runs and, in doing so, became the first team in Test history to win after following on. They followed this with another win in Melbourne . Australia then won the third Test in Adelaide in blistering heat and easily won the fourth in Sydney by an innings and 147 runs. With the series tied at two-all, the fifth and deciding Test was held back in Melbourne. Public interest in this ‘historic Test match’ reached unprecedented heights, surpassing even the 1892 matches that had featured the great W.G. Hundreds of fans arrived by train from Adelaide and Sydney, with 28,000 attending the second day alone—a world record for a cricket match—and it was reported that 100,000 attended over the course of the five days. The scores were wired to newspaper offices in Sydney and large crowds blocked the streets to watch the updates being posted in the windows. 20 The Australasian described the intense interest that the game aroused in lengthy and vivid detail, claiming that ‘no Victorian event … has created so much excitement … [and] those who could get down to the ground every day were looked upon as the lucky ones of this earth’. 21

The 1896 Australian tour of England continued where the 1894–1895 England tour of Australia left off. In a close-fought three-Test series, Australia was unlucky to lose two to one. Overall, the series enjoyed large crowds, high scoring and very sporting relations between the two teams. The Australian Eleven were disciplined, popular and highly respected and went a long way towards remedying the image left by the previous Australian team in England . The rejuvenation of Australian cricket was well and truly on display when England toured in 1897–1898. After losing the first Test, the Australians went on to win the next four by convincing margins. Of the Australian Eleven, ‘Felix’ said they were ‘the finest combination of players I have ever seen in action. They played as if the eleven had only one mind and that a master-mind of cricket’. The English press, for its part, carped about the fact that the metropole had not sent their best team to the colony. 22 The progress made by Australian cricket since the ‘doldrums’ of the late 1880s received its ultimate validation when the 1899 Australian side toured England and won the series. This was the first series win in England since the famous 1882 tour . Indeed, the Times went one better and concluded that ‘Mr Darling’s Eleven of 1899 is the best that has ever come from the Antipodes ’. 23 The outbreak of the Boer War on 11 October 1899 then prevented any further international tours until the 1901–1902 English tour of Australia.

Clearly the 1890s saw a resurgence of cricket in Australia, a development that was undoubtedly assisted by the resumption of regular, popular and successful Anglo-Australian tours. But did this period also fulfil Lord Sheffield’s other desired outcom—the ‘re-soldering’ of British World bonds between metropole and colony? At a more general level, there was certainly a noticeable upsurge in imperial sentiment in the 1890s. Inspired by the work of Seeley and Dilke regarding Greater Britain , there were various discussions about the possibility of an Imperial Federation . In the sporting sphere there were calls for a kind of pan-Britannic festival that would be held periodically in order to showcase the industrial, cultural and athletic achievements of Greater Britain . Moreover, the ‘athletic’ part of the festival was by no means to be undervalued since, as the St James Gazette reported, ‘strong is the bond of nationality, strong are the ties of commerce, but stronger than either is the “union of heart” which comes from devotion to the same forms of recreation’. 24

Lord Sheffield’s tour should be viewed as a manifestation of this new pan-Britannic ideal, this urge to bind closer the far-flung component parts of Greater Britain . As we have seen, Sheffield consciously invoked the British World on the tour and played a role in the amelioration of differences between the colonies through the organisation of the Sheffield Shield . Indeed, at the administrative level there were signs that the newly formed ACC might act as a catalyst for closer cooperation not only between the colonies but with the metropole as well. Upon his departure, Sheffield had advocated for the leading cricketing associations of each state to take over the management of all future tours, and the obvious administrative body for doing so was the ACC. Sheffield’s desire received support from the MCC in England which resolved in 1893 that ‘if the Australasian Cricket Council find it possible to send over a representative team, it will be welcomed by MCC’. 25 Such official patronage of an Australian team by the MCC was unprecedented.

But if there were plans being laid for a closer union between these governing bodies in the metropole and the colony, they were sabotaged by competing vested interests in Australia. The ACC was hamstrung from its inception by two key rival sources of power in Australian cricket. The first was the traditional administrative bodies in NSW and Victoria that had hitherto shared (and competed for) control of Australian cricket—the Melbourne Cricket Club and the SCG Trustees. The second rival power source was the players themselves, who had always wielded a significant chunk of control over Anglo-Australian tours and team selection. The formation of the ACC represented a potential loss of control and prestige for both these traditional power centres and thus it never received the support of either; indeed, both consistently acted against it. It was also hampered by persistent financial woes. As C.F.W. Lloyd , vice president of the NSWCA , commented, ‘Throughout the period of the Council’s existence, international cricket remained in the control of the Melbourne Club. The council was an effete body. It had little, if any, power, and even less control’. 26 On 15 May 1899, NSW resigned from the council, and the life of this purportedly federal body ended with a whimper when the remaining delegates from Victoria and South Australia formally disbanded it in January 1900. 27

Furthermore, below the administrative level, familiar tensions reappeared which mitigated against any exaggerated aspirations of pan-Britannic concord that may have been being voiced in the upper echelons of Anglo-Australian cricketing administration. Perhaps the most familiar of these tensions was the ongoing wrangles over the status of the Australian cricketers. Again, the Australians were criticised for their crass commercialism and for assuming amateur status when, in metropolitan eyes, they were clearly anything but. The chorus of reproach from the British press was possibly even more acerbic than in previous years. For example, the Sporting Chronicle complained in 1899: ‘We wine and dine [the Australians], we dub them “Esq.” on some of the cricket cards, we treat him to the prefix of “Mr” in some of our leading newspapers, we elevate him above the pronounced professional, yet the Australian cricketers are on a trip in quest of boodle’. 28 Writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1900, N.L. Jackson spoke of the scourge of the ‘promateur’ and singled out the Australian cricketers as ‘those great offenders against the first principles of amateurism … [and] why these evils have been so long tolerated by those in authority it is difficult to conceive’. 29 These criticisms were shared at the highest level of cricket administration, with Lord Hawke , a prominent member of the MCC committee, declaring in 1892:

What I do most strongly object to is that one or two men should ‘run’ the thing as a commercial proposition and spoil our cricket. If the teams are coming over for the one object of making money, I maintain that they are not wanted. But if the Melbourne CC, for instance, will send over men whose object is to play the game, without consideration of how much money it will bring them, then by all means let us welcome such a team. It is one thing to pay an amateur’s legitimate expenses, it is another to put money in his pocket. 30

These issues came to a head on the 1896 Australian tour of England . In scenes reminiscent of the 1881 players’ strike by seven Notts professionals, four Surrey professionals and one Notts professional who had been picked for the forthcoming Third Test against the Australians refused to play unless their fee was increased from £10 to £20. On the eve of the match, three players backed down but also signed a letter of explanation in which they proclaimed: ‘The Australians have made and are making large sums by these fixtures and it seemed to us only reasonable that we should beneficiate in a small way out of the large amount of money received’. Clearly the striking professionals were equating their status with that of the Australians, a belief which was widespread in Britain. This conflation was made explicit by one journalist in 1896 who asserted:

As regards the class of the men socially, it is much the same as that of most previous Australian elevens—good, straightforward fellows of the rough and ready sort, but the majority of whom in this country would undoubtedly go into the players’ room rather than the pavilion. Not that there is any disgrace in being a pro, for there are no men more respected in the world of sport than such as Lohmann, Briggs, Peel. 31

Although this statement was made prior to the strike, it is interesting that the three professionals mentioned were also amongst those who went on strike later in the year. The implication, from both the perspective of the English professionals and the metropolitan press, was that ‘in this country’ the Australians should be categorised as professionals.

This conflation often extended to the way that the Australians played cricket. As we have seen, the Australians had begun to acquire a reputation for slow, obdurate batting in the 1880s. This was even more the case in the 1890s. Arthur Budd , in the Athletic News and Cyclist’s Journal , wrote that they are ‘slow and studiously correct in their cricket, sometimes wearisomely so. They hit at nothing but loose balls, but the fact remains that they are terribly difficult to get rid of’. 32 These sentiments were shared by C.B. Fry who, in the New Review, observed that the Australians ‘set about the game with a determination and dogged pluck that are very effective … moreover they are never defeated until the last ball has been bowled … as a rule their batsmen have adopted methods which may be sure, but which are certainly slow’. The end result was that ‘the general impression left on the minds of the cricket-watching public is that the batting of the Australian team is dull’. 33 Many of these reports were too diplomatic to make any overt statements regarding the reasons behind such a style of play, but Alfred Lyttelton wasn’t so reticent. In explicitly comparing the Australian teams of the 1890s with previous teams of the 1880s, he observed that ‘defensive play has become the rule in Australia’. He elaborated further that ‘cricket as played by the Australians in England is cricket played straightforwardly and above-board for money and though no suggestion or hint of blame is implied by mentioning the fact, it is obvious that as a result different considerations than those of pure sport may enter into the question of the duration of matches’. 34

A related issue which became more prominent in the 1890s was the way in which these discussions concerning the cricket status of the Australians began to imply social and cultural differences between the colony and the metropole. That a tacit sociocultural distinction accompanied many of the above quotes concerning the status of the Australian cricketers was always more or less insinuated. That the Australians were equated with English professionals was always not solely a comment on their practice of making money from cricket tours but also on their social position. Indeed, such an insinuation was made explicit in the above quote that described the ‘class of the men socially … as good straightforward fellows of the rough and ready sort, but the majority of whom in this country would undoubtedly go into the players’ room rather than the pavilion’.

But what is most significant in the 1890s is that the Australians began to talk back to the metropole and criticise the class distinctions embedded in English cricket. Thus, again, there was real bi-directional cultural traffic being transacted on this issue. The Australian batsman M.A. Noble was on record stating that ‘the Australians cannot understand the amateurs having one building to themselves, and the professionals another. Then, too, the separate treatment is kept up on the field. The amateurs come out in one group to field, and the professionals another. They lunch apart. Now, this would be quite impossible in Australia’. 35 The manager of the 1899 Australian side, J.H. Phillips , went further to argue that these class distinctions were to the detriment of English cricket:

Off the field an Australian captain receives the benefit of the opinions of his comrades as if he were chairman of a board of directors. The average English captain is more of an autocrat. He rarely seeks advice from his men. If a consultation be held it is invariably confined to the amateurs and the batsmen, not the professionals and the bowlers … Another mistake is made in England which does not improve cricket as a science—that is, the system of isolating professionals off the field. Surely, if a man is good enough to play on the same side he is good enough to dress in the same dressing-room. It is there most useful hints and ideas are exchanged when a game is in progress, which cannot be done so well on the field. 36

As always, the response from the metropole is telling. There were some, like Fred A. McKenzie , writing in the Windsor Magazine , who saw the more egalitarian element in Australian cricket in a largely positive light. He wrote that the 1896 Australian team was ‘a standing witness to the democratic tendencies of colonial life. Our southern dominions know nothing of the sharp divisions between “gentlemen” and “players” that time-honoured custom has sanctioned in England . … Everyone who can do good work is welcome on equal terms with the others, altogether apart from his social position’. 37 However, the response from one of the top English administrators of the game in the 1890s, Lord Hawke , is perhaps more pertinent. In his memoirs, Hawke observed:

It is rather curious that the Australians themselves do not realise that our Professionals prefer to be ‘on their own’ off the field rather than to be in the same hotel as the amateurs. Indeed, I know that some of our professionals would prefer to have second-class passages on board ship rather than having to dress each night for dinner. This is not the least diminishing the perfect accord between English amateurs and professionals, both on and off the field … It is merely the statement of a psychological fact, which seems to puzzle our friends in the Antipodes , and which to us, within the group of English cricket, is quite comprehensible and rational. 38

Whether the metropolitan response was positive (McKenzie) or otherwise (Hawke), the salient point for our purposes is that both opinions were noting a difference between the cricketing culture of the colony and that of the metropole.

In the 1890s, there was another way in which the colony demonstrated an increased assertiveness and that was through the emergence of the ‘barracker’. Barracking described the habit of those spectators in the cheap seats who would indulge in shouting derogatory remarks towards the opposition players. The practice was particularly apparent on the 1897–1898 English tour of Australia, with the captain of the English team, A.E. Stoddart , complaining in his speech at the end of the tour:

I have the right as an English cricketer who has been out here so often to make a reference to the insults which have been poured upon me and my team during our journey through this country. I can assure you that by a section of the crowd we have been insulted, hooted at, and hissed in every match and on every ground without exception. Another matter is that a certain section of the press has been equally insulting to the team. 39

Another member of Stoddart’s team, Prince Ranjitsinhji , backed up his captain’s comments and stated that he had ‘never witnessed [in Britain] such continual “barracking” or such abuse meted out in the press’. 40 The Bulletin described the barracker as ‘fiercely partisan, and the Australian sentiment comes out on top with a decidedly anti-British flavour, expressed in bloodthirsty Australian patois’. 41 It is not immediately apparent whether this was meant as a criticism of the barracker or the opposite. Felix voiced a more reasoned defence of the barracker, maintaining that ‘barracking can never be wholly put down in a crowd of 20,000 or 25,000. Roughs who are very insulting may be singled out and removed, but that is all that can be done, or, in fact, need be done. There is no harm in such comments as “‘Allo, Mac; the kangaroo is still ‘opping”’. 42

The 1890s bore witness to two developments: one, the resurgence of Australian cricket, both in terms of success on the field and popularity, and two, the continuation of bi-directional cultural traffic and, with this, further shifts in a mediated Australian cricketing identity. To turn to the first point, this second wave of Australian cricketing prowess was subtly different to that of the all-conquering 1882 side. The success of the Australian sides of the late 1890s was built upon solid, defensive batting and close-knit teamwork. This style was criticised in the British press as slow and boring and, in some quarters, prompted more by a concern for gate money than any genuine desire to win the game. But the Australian style found a defender in ‘Felix’, the Australian ex-cricketer Tom Horan , who commented in 1892 that ‘the majority of the English batsmen want to get the runs on the slate a bit too rapidly, and so come to grief rather speedily. … Australia’s batting was sounder, if less showy’. 43 These descriptions of the Australian style in the metropole overlapped with the next issue—the bi-directional cultural traffic associated with the status of the Australian players.

While there still might have been those who would have agreed with the governor of Victoria , Lord Brassey , when he pronounced in 1898 that Anglo-Australian cricket tours ‘tend to engage the attention of both England and Australia towards each other, and hence a close relationship of good feeling and brotherhood results’, the ongoing and obvious tensions over the status of Australian players increasingly undercut this. 44 In the past, Australian commentators had sought to defend the Australian position, but what is different in the 1890s is a greater propensity to not only defend but to turn the criticism back on the metropole. Hence, the Australian press and players were increasingly forthright in their critique of the social distinctions inherent in the British cricketing world. This decade also saw the emergence of the Australian barracker. While barracking may not represent the kind of demotic expression of partisan nationalism suggested by the Bulletin , at the very least it indicates a disinclination to exhibit the deference awarded to previous English tours.

To demonstrate how far we’ve come from the earliest metropole-to-colony cultural traffic of the 1860s, it would be difficult in the 1890s to see another visiting metropolitan captain echoing H.H. Stephenson’s feelings that ‘English customs and English feelings were firmly implanted here; the same love of manly sport, the same appreciation of fair play existed that prevails in England . … Everything around us seems so thoroughly English that I could almost imagine we were still home’. There is a neat analogy of this shift in metropole/colony relations that is inadvertently provided in P.F. Warner’s Cricket Across the Seas. Warner notes that a different follow-on rule had developed in Australia and writes that he was ‘very much surprised to learn that this practice had been adopted in all recent Test Matches in Australia, for I had previously imagined that the laws of the Marylebone C.C. extended everywhere, and that in whatever part of the world the game was played those laws were religiously observed’. 45 Again, this is very different to the 1860s and 1870s when Australian cricketers slavishly mimicked the imported English coaching professionals. It is also symbolic of an emergent Australian way of playing cricket that was at odds with the metropolitan model.

FormalPara Notes
  1. 1.

    Much of the information in the following two paragraphs comes from David Montefiore (1992) Cricket in the Doldrums: The Struggle Between Private and Public Control of Australian Cricket in the 1880s (Sydney: Australian Society for Sports History), pp. 56–72. See also Jack Pollard (1987) The Formative Years of Australian Cricket, 1803–1893 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson), ch. 18.

  2. 2.

    Pall Mall Gazette, 8 June 1886, p. 2.

  3. 3.

    James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual , 1887 (London: Lillywhite, Frowd and Co.), p. 18.

  4. 4.

    Quoted in Montefiore , Cricket in the Doldrums, pp. 68–69.

  5. 5.

    A.W. Pullin (1902) Alfred Shaw , Cricketer: His Career and Reminiscences (London: Cassell and Company), p. 101.

  6. 6.

    The Australasian 12 November 1887, p. 933.

  7. 7.

    James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual 1889 (London: Lillywhite, Frowd and Co.), p. 20.

  8. 8.

    Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 8 November 1890, p. 1053.

  9. 9.

    Pullin, Alfred Shaw , Cricketer, p. 104.

  10. 10.

    Pollard, Formative Years, p. 309.

  11. 11.

    The Age 2 January 1892, p. 9.

  12. 12.

    The Age, 29 March 1892, p. 6; The Australasian, 24 September 1892, p. 595.

  13. 13.

    Pullin, Alfred Shaw , Cricketer, p. 106.

  14. 14.

    Pollard, Formative Years, p. 307–13.

  15. 15.

    Sydney Mail and Daily Advertiser 15 November 1890, p. 1109.

  16. 16.

    Pullin, Alfred Shaw , Cricketer, p. 106.

  17. 17.

    Sydney Morning Herald , 15 September 1892, p. 9.

  18. 18.

    Pullin, Alfred Shaw , Cricketer, p. 104. This idea of a ‘new era’ in Australian cricket was echoed by George Giffen (1898) With Bat and Ball: Twenty-Five Years’ Reminiscences of Australian and Anglo-Australian Cricket (London: Ward, Lock and Co.), p. 120. Cf. quotes about the 1878 tour in chapter two.

  19. 19.

    W.F. Mandle (1973) ‘Cricket and Australian Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 59: 239; Jack Pollard (1987) The Turbulent Years of Australian Cricket, 1893–1917 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson), pp. 4–11.

  20. 20.

    Nat Gould (1895) On and Off the Turf in Australia (London: George Routledge and Sons), pp. 186–88; Stoddart’s Team in Australia, 1894-1895 (London: A.J. Fiettkau, 1895); Inglis , ‘Imperial Cricket’, p. 162.

  21. 21.

    The Australasian , 9 March 1895, pp. 455–458 (quote from 455).

  22. 22.

    Pollard, Turbulent Years, p. 62.

  23. 23.

    The Times , 11 September 1899, p. 7.

  24. 24.

    J.A. Mangan (1988) The Games Ethic and Imperialism : Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (London: Frank Cass, 1998), pp. 52–54.

  25. 25.

    James Bradley (1990) ‘The MCC, Society and Empire: A Portrait of Cricket’s Ruling Body, 1860–1914’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 7, 1: 16.

  26. 26.

    Philip Derriman (1985) True to the Blue: A History of the New South Wales Cricket Association (New South Wales: Richard Smart), p. 105.

  27. 27.

    Radcliffe Grace (1985) ‘The Rise and Fall of the Australasian Cricket Council, 1892–1900’, Sporting Traditions 2, 1: 37–46.

  28. 28.

    Sporting Chronicle 12 August 1899.

  29. 29.

    N.L. Jackson (1990) , ‘Professionalism and Sport’, Fortnightly Review : 160.

  30. 30.

    Interview in The Cricket Field (1892): 92.

  31. 31.

    Cited in James Bradley (1991) ‘Cricket, Class and Colonialism, c. 1860–1914: A Study of 2 Elites. The Marylebone and Melbourne Cricket Clubs’ , unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of Edinburgh), p. 64.

  32. 32.

    Cited in Bradley, ‘Cricket, Class and Colonialism’, p. 65.

  33. 33.

    C.B. Fry (1896) ‘Cricket in ‘96’, The New Review (1896): p. 366.

  34. 34.

    Alfred Lyttelton (1899) ‘Cricket Reform’, The National Review 34, 200: p. 233.

  35. 35.

    Quoted in Mandle ‘Cricket and Australian Nationalism’, 241.

  36. 36.

    The Australasian 21 October 1899, p. 917.

  37. 37.

    Fred A. McKenzie, (1896) , ‘The Australian Cricketers’, The Windsor Magazine : An Illustrated Monthly for Men and Women, 168. See also the thoughts of British novelist and sports lover Nat Gould, who spent eleven years in Australia between 1884 and 1895. In commenting on the pleasure of attending the cricket grounds of Australia, he wrote, ‘In the old country there is far too much catering for the privileged few at the expense of the many. The Australians would never stand for such absurd arrangements as are in force at an Oxford and Cambridge or an Eton and Harrow match. … It is a pleasure to watch a match on the Association Ground, Sydney . It is anything but a pleasure to do so on many English cricket grounds’. Nat Gould (1895) On and Off the Turf in Australia (London: George Routledge), pp. 189–190.

  38. 38.

    Lord Hawke (1924) Recollections and Reminiscences (London: Williams and Norgate), p. 98.

  39. 39.

    The Australasian 5 March 1898, p. 521.

  40. 40.

    Prince Ranjitsinhji (1898) With Stoddart’s Team in Australia (London: James Bowden), 285–286.

  41. 41.

    The Bulletin 23 March 1895, p. 16.

  42. 42.

    The Australasian, 26 March 1898, p. 688.

  43. 43.

    The Australasian 30 January 1892, p. 209.

  44. 44.

    Prince Ranjitsinhji , With Stoddart’s Team in Australia, p. 253.

  45. 45.

    P.F. Warner (1903) , Cricket Across the Seas: Being an Account of the Tour of Lord Hawke’s Team in New Zealand and Australia (London: Longmans), pp. 149–52.