Amongst my collection of
ephemera I came across a letter dated
[Monday] 10 May 1880 sent by a certain O D Tomlinson in Macclesfield to a William
Challenor. At face value it reads rather
dully as it concerns some financial wrangling. However, there is an underlying
theme to the letter in that it reports the arrival of the Orient Line steamer
the Garonne,
a ship that was built in 1871 and, previously with the Pacific Steam Navigation
Company, was transferred to the Orient Steam Navigation Company in 1878.
What has this to do with cricket
one might ask. The answer is that the Australian side of 1880, the second
Australian tourists to visit these shores travelled on the ship. And to confirm
this, there is attached to the verso of the first page of the letter a very
small article from the Evening Mail of
3 May headed ARRIVAL OF THE AUSTRALIAN
CRICKETERS.
The article states, 'The Australian cricketers arrived at Plymouth late last night in the Orient liner Garonne. Two of the team leave Plymouth
for London by the first train this (Monday)
morning, and the remainder follow in the Garonne.
In addition to the matches previously arranged for the Australians, the
gentlemen of Scotland are to meet them on September 16 at Edinburgh.' Which
two travelled ahead of their colleagues is not known.
The schedule for the tour had
been hastily arranged and there were only six first-class matches originally
scheduled, these in addition to the approximately 45 games that were played
against the odds. In the event three more first-class games were added, against
the Players of the North at Bradford, Nottinghamshire at TrentBridge and against England at The
Oval. The last mentioned game came about when Surrey secretary CW Alcock
graciously cancelled the game against Surrey
and asked Lord Harris to choose a representative England XI. He duly did so and
the first England versus Australia
test match took place.
The record for the first-class
fixtures on the tour was that Australia
won four, drew three and lost two of the nine games. The two losses came
against England
in the test match and against Nottinghamshire where a gallant 66 not out by
Arthur Shrewsbury gave his side a one-wicket victory. In the test WG Grace made
152, as England
made 420. Australia,
149 all out, followed on and in their second effort skipper Billy Murdoch
topped Grace's score by one run, and was not out in their total of 327. Needing
just 57 runs to win, England lost five wickets for 31 but 27 not out by Kent's
Frank Penn saw them home by five wickets at 57-5.
Unfortunately for Australia their
main strike bowler, the Demon Spofforth, was out injured for most of September
and therefore missed the match. This did not prevent him from topping the
first-class bowling averages with 40 wickets at a measly 8.40 runs each; Eugene
Palmer was the leading wicket-taker with 66 wickets at 11.69 runs each. Percy
McDonnell was the leading runscorer with 391 runs at an average of 27.93,
closely followed by Murdoch with 339 runs at an average of 24.21.
After attending a banquet given
by the Lord Mayor of London,
the Australians sailed for home on 5 October. And as for the Garonne, it was sold in 1897 to F
Waterhouse of Seattle to be used for the Alaska
gold rush trade!
Although not a pure cricketing
letter, Mr Tomlinson did provide us with a jolly good reason to look back on a
cricketing tour of long ago.