Britain in 1926 was a troubled country. Revolution was in the air as the catastrophic after-effects of the First World War continued. A General Strike in May soon ended, but it left a legacy of bitterness and recrimination. Millions of workers across many industries were sacked or locked out, and coal mining came to a standstill. Poverty was widespread, but it lived alongside plenty. Against this backdrop Australia’s cricketers arrived to defend the Ashes that they had won decisively in all three series since the war.
Cricket in England, like everything else, was still recovering after the conflict. The whole population was desperate for success as interest in the matches transcended class and status. In his new book, A Striking Summer, Stephen Brenkley captures the drama of the series, delves into the characters of the players and shows how in such troubled times the game of cricket briefly united the nation. The following extract charts the extraordinary level of excitement that accompanied the Australians’ arrival in England and how, despite the many grave challenges facing the country, the impending Ashes found its way to the forefront of the national conversation.
There had been nothing quite like it before. The train carrying Australia’s cricketers chugged into Victoria Station at 10pm on 18 April. Throngs packed the platform and lined the streets outside. Police had to hold them back. Conservative estimates of the crowd size put it at 30,000; the more liberal count nudged it to 50,000.
The tourists, en route from Dover where they had arrived after leaving their boat at Naples and travelling through continental Europe, had been besieged by young autograph hunters. They were warned what to expect on reaching Herne Hill but were still astonished at their greeting. “I don’t think that ever in the annals of cricket either in Australia or here a team has been given such a welcome as we were given today,” said Sydney Smith, Australia’s seasoned manager, who had seen everything.
At Victoria, small boys armed with autograph books mingled with excited Australian sailors. ‘On with the Kangaroos, on with the Wallabies, on with the diggers,’ the servicemen kept yelling. And the Englishmen present, who vastly outnumbered them, simply laughed uproariously.
Such a gathering represented the end of the long first part of the propaganda campaign which had been waging for months about the 16th Australian visit to England. Phoney wars, in which supporters and sometimes players, trade jocular insults and improbable predictions, have long since become a staple factor in the build-up to Ashes series. In the duller encounters they have often proved the most enjoyable element. But 1926 saw the first shining example of the phenomenon.
A few bullish remarks made by the Surrey captain, Percy Fender, warmed things up nicely. Speaking to an audience in London he suggested that Australian cricketers “do certain things that are not in our game.” There was no elaboration, but there was no need. Australia immediately assumed that Fender was accusing the team of gamesmanship or worse, and when the team left Melbourne a few days later the accompanying officials queued up to deprecate Fender. It was all lovely stuff, grist to the mill of any self-respecting reporter of gossip.
This all had something to do with cricket’s blanket popularity but also with the 14 long years that had passed since England had last won the Ashes. In three successive series since the proper war, the First World War, they had been swept aside. Now there was renewed hope.
When the Aussies reached the Hotel Cecil on The Strand, there was an impromptu press conference at which Smith and the captain, Herbie Collins, spoke. One of the stories in the preceding months about which much had been made was the Australian Cricket Board’s decision to ban wives from joining their husbands on tour. A reporter asked Smith what would happen if one of the players married an English girl during the tour. A hypothetical question, said Smith, which he had better not answer.
What made this joyous assembly the more remarkable – but possibly the reason for it – was that the country was on the verge of a crisis which threatened to tear it apart. It had been nine months (or maybe five years) in the making, another type of phoney war, running virtually parallel with the increasingly excitable prognostications about the cricket. People wanted to dwell on the imminent Test series rather than think about the real catastrophe round the corner.
In July 1925, with mine owners once more demanding increased hours and reduced wages for their workers, the government averted another bitter confrontation by subsidising the industry for nine months. This agreement was due to run out on 30 April 1926. The Australians arrived slap bang in the middle of it all.
A Royal Commission which had been established during the uncomfortable period of peace produced recommendations but no commitment. The colliery owners and the miners were again on a collision course. But this time the miners had the support of their fellow members in the Trades Union Congress who themselves were feeling the pinch of lower pay and a higher cost of living.
This time they really were in it together. The workers’ plight was worsened by the country’s return to the Gold Standard. The Gold Standard was used to measure the value of sterling (and most of the world’s other major currencies) by a specific weight in gold and helped to ensure fixed exchange rates. It was abandoned at the outbreak of war but the pressure to return to it was almost constant afterwards in Conservative circles, where it was seen as an essential part of Britain’s standing in the world.
The eminent economist, John Maynard Keynes, urged the government to stick to the system which had prevailed since the war; this would allow the United Kingdom to keep control of its internal credit system. But the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, disagreed. When he announced the return of the Gold Standard early in 1925, sterling was pegged at its rate in 1914. This overvalued it by at least 10 percent and the results proved disastrous. Almost 75% of British coal in the last three months of 1925 cost more to produce than it was worth. Employers responded by imposing wage reductions. That led to the accusation that the workers had been sold out for the benefit of the City and its financier pals. One joyous night at Victoria Station was not enough to conceal the whiff of rebellion.
As a cricket buff Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister, did not easily let the affairs of state, even at this crucial juncture, interfere with his interest. Baldwin had led the Conservatives to a landslide General Election victory in late 1924 after several years of unstable or minority governments, and his position therefore was secure, if subject to regular criticism bordering on disparagement from a right-wing cabal in his cabinet many of whom possessed neither his moderation nor his vision.
If Baldwin was determined to try to end the industrial strife, he was equally intent on ensuring that he had time for cricket. One evening shortly before the Australians arrived, Baldwin’s close confidant Tom Jones, the deputy cabinet secretary, dashed to see him in Downing Street after a failed meeting with the mine owners. Jones found that the prime minister wanted merely to discuss the foreword he had written that weekend to a book on the history of matches between Eton and Harrow (Baldwin was a Harrovian).
Potential revolution must not be allowed to impede the general order of affairs – and nobody then, except perhaps the most committed Bolshevik, considered it remotely strange that the match between the two schools should be at Lord’s. Baldwin regularly attended Worcestershire matches when he was back home in his constituency and stood beside the sight screen wearing his Panama hat, pipe ruminatively in mouth, so he could be sure to see the ball’s movement.
Two days after the tourists landed, a luncheon was held in their honour in London’s Criterion Restaurant. With the subsidy to the mine owners about to expire and with lock-out notices already posted outside collieries, Baldwin found the time not only to turn up but to deliver a speech. The main offering was given by the author and another cricket fanatic, JM Barrie, a whimsical little piece in which he suggested that the England team was to be composed mostly of new men who were hidden in cellars. The fast bowler was a chap called WK Thunder and the batting of such impressive talent that Jack Hobbs would be 12th man. The audience lapped it up.
Barrie was crazy about cricket and ran his own team for years. It was called the Allahakbarries and featured many fellow authors including Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse and AA Milne. Even as Barrie spoke, Milne was putting the finishing touches to the first stories of his most famous fictional character, Winnie-the-Pooh, which were about to be published.
Baldwin proposed the toast to ‘Our Australian Guests’. He made a joke about cricket and rabbits both having been exported from England to Australia but that rabbits had somehow not found their way into the Australian cricket team. It brought the house down. Probably it was one of those occasions when you had to be there.
The PM also held out a hand of sympathy to the chairman of selectors, Pelham Warner. “I want to ask him not to allow his nerves to be rattled by the press barrage under which our opponents are advancing to fight us. I can assure you I have passed through those barrages unscathed.” To compare the scrutiny which Warner had to bear with the daily examinations of his own response to the approaching industrial cataclysm said something, at least, about Baldwin’s devotion to the game.
Anticipation of the 1926 series had begun as soon as Arthur Gilligan’s team left Australia in March 1925. There were no Test matches in England that summer so the Ashes dominated sporting conversation. The Ashes, that is, and Hobbs, the most popular sportsman in the country. Hobbs had many great summers, but 1925 was probably the acme, the year that he scored 3,000 runs, 14 hundreds and surpassed WG Grace’s record of 125 first-class centuries. The whole country was in thrall to Hobbs as he eventually equalled the record in Taunton and went past it the next day.
The euphoria which greeted this achievement showed that football’s grip on the nation, though hardly inconsiderable, was not yet relentless. Huddersfield Town won the league championship for the third time in succession and Bolton Wanderers the FA Cup Final, then by far the most prestigious match of the year, against Manchester City, who were also relegated. But there was just as much attention when Yorkshire won the County Championship for the fourth consecutive season.
Teams in the northern outposts thus dominated in both major sports, the same northern outposts where the effects of strikes would be most keenly felt. For all that thousands were flocking to professional football each week, it was generally sensed that cricket remained the national sport and that the matches against Australia were its apex. Who would pick the England team? Who would lead it? Gilligan was the man in possession, so to speak, but his spark seemed to have been extinguished.
Up in Nottingham Arthur Carr was having the season of his life, booming hundred after hundred – without taking any attention away from Hobbs – and leading 10 professionals who thought the world of him. The major topics of conversation in both countries surrounded these two subjects: selectors and captaincy.
Australia had to act first in both cases. Its board appointed three selectors in October: Clem Hill, the former Test batter and the Test record runs scorer, in addition to the players Herbie Collins and Jack Ryder. It virtually guaranteed that Collins would be captain and Ryder would be in the touring party.
On the penultimate day of the year, Australia announced the first 12 of the 15 players it intended to take. Collins was duly nominated as captain and Ryder was also included. The others were: Warren Bardsley, Charlie Macartney, Tommy Andrews, Bill Ponsford, Jack Gregory, Johnny Taylor, Stork Hendry, Bert Oldfield, Arthur Mailey and Clarrie Grimmett.
As so often, it was not so much who was in as who was out that exercised most of the reaction. It was pretty clear that Australia’s bowling resources were depleted for the time being, not helped by Ted McDonald having decided to make his home in England. But they had left out the all-rounder Charlie Kelleway, who was in form.
Kelleway scored 99 not out in the trial match early in December and on the day the selectors met was in the middle of an innings of 145 not out in a Sheffield Shield match in which he also opened the bowling. His non-appearance in the squad served as a distraction relished by the English press. They were being scurrilous in suggesting that he was still at loggerheads with various cricket associations at home and that it all went back to the Australian Imperial Forces side in 1919; but it was not based solely on gossip.
During a Sheffield Shield match after the original 12 were picked, Ryder was subject to intense barracking as he went out to bat. It left the selectors in some disarray. The intention was that Collins and Ryder would rubber-stamp the remaining members of the party at a match between New South Wales and Victoria in Sydney in which they were both playing, with the endorsement of Hill in Adelaide. But Hill had to be sent for to attend in person. Despite the populist uprising, Kelleway did not make the final cut.
Australia added three players: Arthur Richardson, a dependable batsman and medium pace off-break bowler, Bill Woodfull, who made a hundred in the game, and John Ellis, reserve wicketkeeper. Finally, as an afterthought they included Sam Everett, whose nine wickets for New South Wales in the fixture they were watching persuaded them that his raw, youthful pace was needed as support for Gregory. Suddenly 23-year-old Everett was being proclaimed as being the new fast bowling sensation. Gregory himself was reported as saying that Everett would soon be the greatest fast bowler that Australia had ever produced.
While England’s press were mocking the Australian indecision, the Aussies in turn poked fun at the mother country’s old-fashioned ways. In discussing the selection made by Hill and company, the Melbourne Age pushed at an open door to deride the policy which dictated that an amateur must always captain England, the corollary being that a professional must never do so. Naturally, the Age alighted on Hobbs as an obvious candidate. “His many years of fine performances on the field have not made him acceptable as a cricket captain, the one post for which his qualifications could not be excelled. English conservatism sometimes appals.”