Spirit On The Water Read Free Page A

Gatting was ever called this but it seems too good an opportunity to miss!

2. Aborigine tour of England, 1868
    If a team of Aborigines toured England this year playing cricket against various clubs and counties, including the MCC at Lords, it would be a pretty extraordinary event. Imagine what it must have been like in 1868, for that is when it happened. An official Australian team had yet to tour England. The first Test match between England and Australia was still ten years away.
    Charles Lawrence was the man responsible for making the tour happen. Lawrence was a professional cricketer who had led a peripatetic life before arriving in Australia with an England cricket team in 1861. His cricketing jobs had taken him from Merton in Surrey, to Perth in Scotland, back to London and then to Dublin.
    While in Scotland, he had been the professional at the Perth cricket club. At the age of twenty, he had played for a Scotland Twenty-Two against William Clarke’s celebrated All England XI at Edinburgh in May 1849. England won the match but Lawrence was the star of the show. He took all 10 wickets in England’s second innings. His figures were 10 for 53, coincidentally exactly the same analysis as those of Jim Laker when he took all ten Australian wickets in the second innings at Old Trafford in 1956.
    The England team that turned out against Scotland in 1849 contained many of the famous players of the day, including John Wisden and George Parr. When Lawrence bowled Nicholas Felix, one of England’s leading batsmen, Felix was so impressed that he walked up to him, took a half-crown out of his pocket and said:“Take this in remembrance of me.” The true spirit of cricket! Perhaps Kevin Pietersen could be encouraged to do the same sort of thing when he is out to a particularly good ball? Or maybe Ricky Ponting could be persuaded to go up to a fielder after he has been run out and say: “Jolly good throw Gary. Here’s a fiver to remember me by.”
    William Clarke’s All England XI was a band of professional cricketers who toured the country playing wherever they could. Clarke was a very successful bowler taking over 2,000 wickets. Seemingly, his only fault was that he would continue to bowl himself for too long ‘always expecting to get a wicket in his next over’. I’m sure we all know captains like that.
    Richard Daft, the Nottinghamshire batsman and member of Clarke’s team, wrote: “What fun we had in these matches to be sure! We would arrive early, breakfast on bread, cheese and bottled ale. Tom Forster would leave his umpire’s post and come into the pavilion for more at the fall of each wicket.”
    Apart from the “arrive early”, it seems very reminiscent of Taverners cricket today! It is good to know that these traditions go back such a long way.
    Some years later, William Clarke helped to secure an appointment for Charles Lawrence as professional at the Phoenix Club in Dublin. It would be gratifying to be able to say that the future Ashes series arose out of his time at the Phoenix but that would be stretching things a bit too far.
    In 1858, Lawrence captained an All Ireland XI at Lords. He took eight wickets against a team of English gentlemen (professionals were not allowed to play for the MCC at the time). Lawrence was an adventurer as well as a cricketer and he would have been interested in George Parr’s plans to tour North America in 1859. Lawrence didn’t make that trip but he was invited to be part ofthe 1861/62 tour of Australia that was led by H.H. Stephenson, the Surrey captain.
    Around the same time, Charles Dickens was offered £ 10,000 to undertake a reading tour of Australia. His tours of North America had been interrupted rather inconveniently by the American Civil War. In the end, he didn’t go but finished off Great Expectations instead; an appropriate theme for that first tour of Australia and indeed all subsequent ones.
    Stephenson’s England team sailed from Liverpool on 20 th October