22 of Southland, 15 of Canterbury

In the summer of 1876-77, James Lillywhite brought a team of England’s best cricketers out to New Zealand and Australia. Beginning with games against Australian domestic sides, Lillywhite’s All England XI then jumped the ditch to take on our domestic teams before returning to Australia to play cricket’s first ever Test matches. While much has been made of those Tests, Lillywhite’s All England XI enjoyed a successful, and somewhat unusual, tour to New Zealand that is seldom mentioned.

Each New Zealand domestic side that faced off against the All England XI featured 22 players in an attempt to even up the score. It didn’t work. Lillywhite’s side brushed aside Auckland, Wellington, Taranaki, Nelson and Southland, inflicting innings’ defeats. Canterbury put up more of a fight, losing by just 23 runs, while Westland and Otago managed to hang on for the draw. What was particularly unusual about these sides was that they didn’t just use 22 batsmen, they had 22 players in the field too – making it close to impossible for Lillywhite’s batsmen to pick the gaps.

In all these games, the highest score managed by any batsman on the New Zealand sides was the 31 made by Auckland’s Robert Yates in the tour opener. At the other end of the scale, the scorecards for the 8 domestic sides featured a combined total number of more than 100 ducks. To give that some perspective, New Zealand played 26 years of Test cricket before they recorded 100 ducks.

Southland were the last New Zealand side to play the All England XI and they didn’t fare any better than the others, losing by an innings and 65 runs. The tour had been squeezed into such a tight schedule that Lillywhite’s players had to leave on the match’s final afternoon. This led the Southland batsmen to take their time getting to the crease after each dismissal, a ploy that proved unsuccessful as there was still time after the game finished for an official farewell before the visitors departed. While the lack of competition offered by Southland was unlikely to be ideal preparation for the momentous occasion to follow, the same eleven players represented England in their first Test against Australia.

In a twist of touring, when the Australians toured New Zealand in 1878, Southland were the first side to take them on. This gave Southland the unique honour of being the last side to play England before the first Tests, and the first international side to play Australia after the first Tests. Not bad for the southernmost cricket association. Unfortunately for Southland their performance didn’t improve in the time between hosting these international sides: Australia won by an innings and 139 runs after Charles Bannerman hit 125 and Fred Spofforth took 14 wickets in the first innings. In a show of generosity to their hosts, Spofforth didn’t bowl at all in the second innings.

The ball used in the Canterbury XV v. Australian XI match in 1878.
– NZ Cricket Museum collection

The 1878 Australians didn’t enjoy quite as successful a tour as the All England XI. While they inflicted serious defeats on Southland, Wellington and Auckland, Otago and Oamaru held out for draws. However the most incredible result of the tour was against Canterbury, the formative powerhouse of New Zealand cricket. Where the other domestic sides followed the pattern of the All England tour and played 22 against Australia’s 11, Canterbury were deemed to be serious-enough competition to play just 15. Part of the reason for Canterbury’s early dominance of cricket in New Zealand, and their performance in this match, may have been due to their selection strategy: of Canterbury’s 15, only John Fowler was NZ-born and another member of the side was William Rees, WG Grace’s cousin. After bowling the highly-touted Australians out for just 46 in the first innings, Canterbury went on to win the historic match by 6 wickets.

In Praise of the Scrapbook

There was a time when a scrapbook was part and parcel of a sports’ fan’s everyday life. In a time before the internet and TV there was just the radio and newspapers. All over the world, people would listen to live match commentaries hissing through the ether from the other side of the globe and, for the next day or two afterwards, would eagerly read newspapers seeking confirmation and elaboration about what they had heard. Inevitably many of them would cut out those reports and carefully glue them in a scrapbook (how many school exercise books served this useful purpose!) and from them create their own lists of statistics, thoughts and memories.

J Hunt’s 1948 Scrap Book – NZ Cricket Museum collection

Of course, now it is very different. We have countless websites that connect us immediately, and in remarkable detail, with the world of cricket. We can stream games, search statistics and read opinions in a flash. We can tweet more information in a day than we would pick up in six months (and only then after hard searching) thirty or forty years ago. For better or worse, it was different then and the New Zealand Cricket Museum has boxes of scrapbooks that confirm this. Some of them were compiled by the players themselves, documenting their tours to far-off lands or cataloguing a particular domestic season. Others were compiled by fans of the game, and it’s one of those we’ve chosen to write about.

In 1948 the Australians sent a formidable team to tour England. In fact, they played the entire tour without losing a single game: 34 matches played, 25 won and 9 drawn. They won 4 Test matches and drew the other one. This remarkable feat was achieved over a relentless schedule that saw them playing cricket on 112 days of a 144-day tour. The team has became known to history as “The Invincibles” and, somewhere in New Zealand, a young “J. Hunt” was avidly following the team’s progress.

The first page of the old school exercise book they used to document the tour had the tour itinerary written out in copperplate handwriting. The key points of each county game the Australians played are written, page-by-page, in chronological order in the same elegant style. Occasionally, there is a picture or a written report from a newspaper (hard to say which one, although the paper meticulously prints the time each report arrived in the country) which carried the New Zealand Press Association reports of the matches.

The Tests are recorded much more extensively with newspaper reports pasted in and full scorecards written out. There is that wonderful picture of Donald Bradman, at the Oval, being bowled second ball by the googly of Hollies for a duck. It was Bradman’s last Test innings ever and left him only four runs short of a completing his career with a Test match average of 100. Finally, at the end of the book, there is a hand drawn map of Great Britain where each county that Australia played is carefully drawn in and identified.

This is probably just one scrapbook of hundreds that was painstakingly compiled covering the same tour. When you touch it, smell the old, fading newsprint and look at the beautiful handwriting you are aware of the time and effort that went into it – the creator must have spent many, many hours bringing it to life. There is also a palpable sense of what we can best describe as ownership. The tour of “The Invincibles” is more than a magical period in the history of the game: it has become part of the life of scrapbook creator. They shaped the tour into forms and patterns of information they wanted to remember and savour. They have written out and detailed the aspects of the tour that were important to them; it now belongs to them and we know that another person’s scrapbook about the same tour could be a very different creation.

Scrapbooks help remind us that cricket is more than the actions of thirteen players on a green field. It’s something in the emotions and thoughts of all those individuals who watch and experience its possibilities. Cricket exists beyond the immediacy of any game and lives on in the minds of people and scrapbooks like this one and the thousands of others that sit in attics, drawers and museums. The game, and all its marvelous layers and interpretations, is kept alive as a result.

Maybe this ‘scrapbooker’ still comes to the cricket and, sitting in the sun, remembers those long ago winter mornings when they grabbed the paper for the latest news. We’d like to think so. Perhaps cricket lost them and they went in another direction. We will probably never know. Either way, we are glad of what they created and how it shows us what it means to be a cricket fan, today or generations ago.

^BP

White Ferns & the Empire

On the 21^st of January 1938, the largest group of New Zealand athletes to ever travel overseas assembled at Wellington’s Queen’s Wharf. In the harbour, the steamer Wanganella was being loaded in preparation for the 8pm sailing to Sydney. Australia was in the midst of celebrating its 150^th anniversary and, in just a few days, the Empire Games would begin in Sydney. On Queen’s Wharf, athletic champions stood alongside the Governor General, cyclists and rowers compared training notes, and the women of the New Zealand cricket side prepared for their very first overseas tour. The significance of the occasion made this perhaps the most celebrated cricket team to leave New Zealand. The morning of departure saw the team enjoy morning tea hosted by Prime Minister Savage, followed by a civic farewell at Wellington’s town hall.

The 1938 White Ferns squad that toured to Sydney.
L-R; I Johns, M Holmes, M Taylor, P Blackler, M Hollis, M Corby;
Seated; E Ingram, I Pickering (C), D Simons (M), R Martin (VC), J Fowler;
Front; D Hatcher, M Thomas.

The 13 members of that White Ferns side were bound for Sydney for a five match tour, highlighted by a 3-day match against New South Wales. Three years had passed since the White Ferns had made their Test debut, and it would be a further ten years before they played Test cricket again, making this tour vital to the continued development of the game. The importance of development was exemplified by the age of the team which included 15-year-old Ida Johns and 25-year-old manager Dot Simons. The team’s oldest members were just 26, although four players had featured against England in 1935, giving the team some much-needed experience.

The first match the tourists played was on board the Wanganella against members of the Empire Games’ team. After a couple of days of rough seas that left even the wrestling team absent at dinner, the cricketers “cleaned up” their shipboard opposition. The weather on the voyage across the Tasman would prove a sample of things to come as the team’s first few games in Sydney coincided with torrential rain. This resulted in the match against NSW Juniors abandoned with New Zealand in good shape for victory, while the marquee 3-day game against NSW became a 1-day game which New Zealand narrowly lost on the first innings. A further narrow loss to South Metropolitan was evened out by comfortable victories against North Metropolitan and Combined Country.

As with the New Zealanders side that toured England in 1927, the performances of this New Zealand team served to reinforce New Zealand’s growing skills on the cricket field. In fact, reports from the tour indicated that the Australians had expressed a serious interest in bringing their national team for a tour and Test matches against the White Ferns. Unfortunately, war would intervene and Australia would not visit until 1948 when their tour began against unusual opposition: Matamata.

Enter Sandman: One More Thing

Excerpt from Daniel Reese’s letter to Clarrie Grimmett, 1927

Anyone who has done historical research will appreciate just how hard it is to wrap up your story. Here at the New Zealand Cricket Museum, the story of the spin duo of Don Sandman & Clarrie Grimmett is shaping up as one that could just keep going on.

This letter from Daniel Reese, written to Clarrie Grimmett in 1927, reinforces Sandman’s place in history as the player who denied Grimmett a spot in the 1913-14 New Zealand side. It also exemplifies how apologetic the New Zealand public became once Clarrie made it blatantly obvious that he was an incredible cricketing talent. Alongside this letter in the New Zealand Cricket Museum collection are many others – from cricket fans, cricketers and the general public – congratulating Clarrie on his exceptional Test cricket performances and letting him know that New Zealand is cheering him on, in spite of the baggy green cap he played under.

Read more of Clarrie & Don’s story here: https://nzcricketmuseum.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/enter-sandman/

 

Enter Sandman

Unless you play cricket for St Albans, where a cup is named in his honour, most New Zealanders won’t know the name, Donald McKay Sandman. Like so many of the players who represented our country before we gained Test status, Don’s efforts have largely been forgotten, left to pages in scorebooks that are seldom flipped through. But Don Sandman should be remembered as one of our cricket pioneers, as one of the best there never was.

SG Smith (Left) & Don Sandman toss a coin before the start of the 1926 Auckland v. Canterbury Plunket Shield match. National Library of New Zealand

Don’s rise to cricketing prominence was rapid; he played a few games in the lower grades at St Albans before a breakthrough season in 1909-10. His 63 scalps at 9.8 runs per wicket that summer saw him picked to debut for Canterbury against Australia in February 1910. Although he didn’t set the world alight, the Canterbury influence on cricket at the time saw him, controversially, selected to debut for New Zealand just a month later, also against Australia.

Sandman’s New Zealand and Canterbury career spanned both sides of World War One, where he also served his country. Don starred in the 1913-14 side that toured Australia, taking wickets, scoring runs and becoming a fan-favourite with the Aussies. But what makes Sandman particularly interesting is the parallel with another New Zealand-born leg spinner, Clarrie Grimmett.

Grimmett is most famous in Australia, where he fashioned an exceptional Test record after leaving New Zealand. In New Zealand, he sat behind Sandman in the pecking order, exemplified by his selection as a non-travelling reserve for the 1913-14 Australia tour, where Don starred. Don even had the upper hand in their one First Class meeting, claiming Clarrie’s wicket in the first innings of the 1914 meeting between Dan Reese’s Canterbury XI and Wellington.

There’s one further twist to the story: before Don returned to New Zealand after World War One his name was put forward to join the Australian Forces cricket side. Eventually, the Australians decided it best not to include a New Zealander in their team, and Don returned home. Had the Australians pursued him, maybe Clarrie would’ve once again found Don between him and a representative cap…