“His body had to be protected from marauding lions – prior to being interred – in a coffin made from whisky cases.”

No other Test cricketer’s Wisden obituary concluded like Montague Parker Bowden’s. His life – he died at only 26 – was just as singular.

“He had steered clear of the rigors”

Bowden’s first-class numbers – 86 games, 2,316 runs at 20.13, 87 dismissals – might have been acceptable for a 19th-century wicketkeeper, but he was never the prototype athlete.

At Dulwich, he demonstrated proficiency at drama, but “steered clear of the rigors of the football field and the Rifle Volunteer Corps,” wrote his biographer Jonty Winch. However, he was proficient enough on either side of the stumps to make it to the strong Surrey side of the 1880s, an Australia tour of 1887/88, and – more significantly for our story – RG Warton’s XI to South Africa in 1888/89.

Bowden was in good form ahead of the South Africa tour. In the summer of 1888, he made 284 against Northamptonshire and 189 not out against Sussex. He was selected in both Gentlemen versus Players games, the most high-profile English cricket fixtures in the pre-County Championship era.

As the Witwatersrand Gold Rush attracted European fortune-seekers to South Africa, the arrival of an English cricket team was only a matter of time. In 1888/89, Warton’s XI carried two gold cups donated by Donald Currie, owner of the Union-Castle Lines: they would be awarded to the best cricket and rugby teams in South Africa.

England’s youngest

No South African side could compete with the strong, experienced tourists, who won everything including the two games against All-South African XIs. Home captain Owen Dunnell’s wife stitched the letters “SA” on the olive-green caps of the home players – presumably to give the contests an “international” feeling – but England did not consider them as Test matches. It was only in 1924 that the Wisden Almanack accepted these (and some other matches involving South Africa) as Tests.

This retrospective definition made South Africa the third Test-playing nation. The first Test featured six English debutants, including Bowden, who was run out for a duck the only time he batted, and captain C Aubrey Smith. England won by eight wickets.

Bowden led in the second Test when Smith was down with enteric fever. This made him the youngest England captain – but he would not know that in his lifetime. Bobby Abel (120) outscored South Africa (47 and 43), while Johnny Briggs bowled 14 batters in match figures of 15-28. Bowden hit five fours in a 16-ball 25 as England won by an innings.

When the SS Garth Castle carried the tourists back home, Smith and Bowden stayed back. They set up a stockbrokers’ firm in Johannesburg. The inaugural edition of the Currie Cup featured only two teams, and was decided by one match. In this, his last first-class match, Bowden 63 and 126 not out as opener and claimed 2-7 to help Transvaal (led by Smith) beat Kimberley.

The man who died twice

The professional partnership broke up almost immediately afterwards (Smith later accused Bowden of being an “untrustworthy” man who had “absconded”). Smith returned home and played more cricket and went on to have a successful acting career (he has a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame), but Bowden’s life went downhill – though, for some reason, Transvaal’s Currie Cup was with him.

Bankrupt by April 1890, Bowden did not turn to his father for financial help. Instead, he travelled north to Mashonaland (now in Zimbabwe), in a gold quest with Cecil John Rhodes’ Pioneer Column. The group stayed at the Central Hotel in Kimberley, where they spent lavishly and ran into debt. When the hotel demanded payment, Bowden handed over the Currie Cup, and they moved on.

It was a rigorous journey for someone who had seldom known hardship. En route, he went down with fever and suffered from what might have been depression. On October 24, 1890, The Star reported his death. Subsequent obituaries appeared in South African newspapers.

The fake news was debunked when the Daily Independent printed an official announcement on December 11: “Fort Salisbury – Mr. Bowden alive and well; he was in here yesterday from Hartley Hills; is very indignant about this false report.”

Interestingly, around the same time, the Graaff-Reinet Advertiser had reported that Smith had “succumbed to that fell disease, inflammation of the lungs”.

But Bowden’s quest for gold had met a dead end. Bowden resorted to importing goods from South Africa to Umtali (now Mutare), at that point “a collection of scattered huts”. The trade route involved extreme heat, dangerous swamps, lions, and crocodiles.

Bowden fell off a post-cart while travelling to Umtali amidst torrential rain. Still, on February 13, 1892, the day after his arrival, he played a cricket match on an earthen road without a mat in Umtali. Playing for the Rest of Manicaland against the Chartered Company, Bowden effected a stumping and, in the second innings, took four wickets, all bowled. He also scored a run – his last.

The next day, he suffered an epileptic seizure, followed by fever where his temperature soared to 107°F. He passed away “very peacefully” four days later, the first registered case of death at the Umtali Hospital (a “glorified mud hut”, as per the Wisden Almanack).

District Surgeon JW Lichfield’s death certificate mentioned epilepsy as the cause of his death, but subsequent investigations cited “the fall from the post-cart, exhaustion, alcohol and sunstroke”.

This time the news was true. Bowden was a mere 26.