Grace vs the press: How the first ever Test match came to pass

When James Lillywhite walked on to the Melbourne Cricket Ground at 1.05pm on March 15, 1877, he knew what he was doing, though not what he was starting. That one small step over the boundary was the game’s giant leap, a match now recognised as the first of more than 2,600 Tests. In being asked to bowl, Lillywhite became not just Test cricket’s first on-field leader, but its first player, our Neil Armstrong leading his team of Buzz Aldrins on to the moonscape of the MCG – and into history. That anniversary must wait until 2027, but it is now 150 years since Lillywhite embarked for Australia, a ripping yarn full of Victorian steampunk adventure.

It was not his first trip to Australia. He had just turned 35, a tough and battle-hardened touring pro from one of the great cricketing families of the South. He was the nephew of William Lillywhite – “The Nonpareil” – and a cousin of James senior, Fred and John, who was the proprietor of a sporting-goods establishment (a five-storey Lillywhites store still looms over Piccadilly Circus).

The Lillywhites were cricketers, entrepreneurs and adventurers. Before he was 20, Fred was publishing the annual Guide to Cricketers; a first edition had appeared in 1849. He joined with John Wisden in a tobacco and sporting-goods emporium in 1855, though the partnership had foundered before Fred joined the first overseas tour by English cricketers, of the United States and Canada in 1859, as scorer. It was skippered by George Parr, and included Wisden, John Lillywhite and Tom Hayward among its stars.

James first played for Sussex in 1862, and would become, after William, the family’s most substantial cricketer, taking more than 1,200 wickets with his slow left-armers, hitting hard down the order and, remarkably, appearing in every game Sussex played between his debut and 1881. He had a pro’s ability to follow the money, first leaving English shores as a member of Edgar Willsher’s party to tour America in 1868.

By then, three years after the Civil War, cricket across the Atlantic was dying. Australia was the new frontier. A land once thought fit only for penal colonies teemed with gold and sheep. Driven by settlers, most new townships had a cricket ground and a racecourse – part entertainment, part nostalgia. By 1861, Victoria alone had 70 cricket clubs, and the game was growing in New South Wales and South Australia, as well as in Tasmania.

To play cricket here was to be in competition with the environment. Wickets were hewn from sun-baked ground, outfields strewn with stones. There was little money for curation. Early tourists found themselves beset by mosquitoes and flies. Yet the game emerged, a touch of home for many expats who came seeking their fortunes in the gold fields or the booming cities, and it was seized upon by locals.

And if there was one cricketer in England who understood and lusted after riches, it was the emerging Leviathan of Downend, the 25-year-old WG Grace. Already sharply aware of his worth, he had asked for, and been refused, a tour fee of £1,500 when the Melbourne Cricket Club wrote to him in the early months of 1872. But the ploy paid off. It had been a decade since Parr’s side appeared in Australia, and the fear at the Melbourne club was that cricket would become isolated.

The notion of a tour without the game’s greatest star proved unthinkable, too. The money was found for 1873, and Grace – the notorious amateur – began to recruit, proving just as tight with funds going out as he was rapacious with those coming in. His offer to his professional tourists was a tenth of what he would receive: £150 for 14 matches, plus £20 spending money. While Grace and his new bride, Agnes, travelled first class, the pros went second class, though all their accommodation was paid. Tom Emmett and Alfred Shaw turned Grace down, but seven professionals agreed, James Lillywhite among them. It was to be an unforgettable and formative experience. Opportunities, money-making and otherwise, would abound, and Lillywhite had a ringside seat.

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Picture the scene. It is January 6, 1874. Lillywhite is alongside his fellow pros in what WG called an “old-fashioned” Cobb Coach. They are making the gruelling 80-mile journey from Ballarat to Stawell inside the horse-drawn carriage, with WG, his brother Fred and their cousin Walter Gilbert on the outside, armed and dangerous. As the leather-sprung coach lurches down the bumpy outback trail, the three keen shooters blaze away at whatever they can see. “Magpies, parrots, woodpeckers, wagtails and rabbits,” said James Southerton, looking on from inside the coach.

If it sounds like a scene from the Wild West, it was emblematic of the tour. Travel took a strong stomach, and WG was not blessed in that department. The rougher passages during the crossing were torturous, and the seafaring was not over once they had landed in Australia. There were choppy, bilious trips between the coastal cities and, when on dry land, a white-knuckle train ride over the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. As WG put it: “The snapping of a coupling would send us careering down the precipitous slope to a certain death.” Grace was lauded when he arrived, but Australia had had its fill of him by the time the tour was over. On the field, his men had a good record. Taking part in odds matches against teams of anything from 18 to 22, they won ten and lost three of their 15 games. On rough pitches and with packed fields, Grace earned his £1,500, making 711 runs at 35 and holding over 40 catches. Lillywhite excelled, too, his deadly twisters bringing him 170 wickets at under six.

But Grace’s overbearing personality, his brash dealings with the local promoters, and dark rumours of betting coups during the three defeats, rubbed up against Australian sensitivities, setting in train attitudes and stereotypes that would persist for decades. The team were welcomed with brass bands, civic receptions and gala dinners, yet Grace behaved mercurially, gouging money whenever he saw the chance. Even as the players prepared for their final game, he demanded £10 a man so they could buy souvenirs.

The press had long since turned on him. This, from a column after the tourists visited Warrnambool, was typical: “Mr Grace and the other gentlemen cricketers take good care to secure the lion’s share of the profits from the expedition, but they object to share the hospitality of the people.”

Lillywhite, meanwhile, protested against the terms of the professionals’ engagement in a lengthy letter to Melbourne’s Argus newspaper: the second-class voyage out was uncomfortable and, while the gentlemen enjoyed private accommodation in every town, some of the hotels allocated to the rest were “let out like a horse and trap”. He requested first-class travel home for him and his “brother” pros: “Now, after making some thousands, the men who helped make it are doomed to a second-class passage home.” Once they had departed, The Argus published a sarcastic rebuke to Lillywhite and Grace: “We cannot decide which of these two sensitive gentlemen has the most cause for complaint.”

It had been an education for Lillywhite, a crash course in how profitable a trip could be, and how discomforting. And if he had learned lessons, so had Australia. Grace’s blunt appraisal of the pitches led to an improvement in groundsmanship, and his hard-nosed competitiveness in the least consequential beer match showed what it took to win. When Lillywhite returned three years later, odds had started to even out.

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In Victoria, he had met John Conway, a fast bowler and journalist who would become a formative force in the flow of teams across the world, and it was Conway who was instrumental in Lillywhite leading the tour that would start it all. For a while there were rival parties vying to lead a trip in the winter of 1876, with WG’s brother Fred hoping to bring a team of gentlemen and players. The Grace name carried weight even without WG: after striking cricket’s first two triple-centuries during the summer, he opted to stay at home and pursue his medical studies. But the idea fizzled out just as Lillywhite’s party of professionals took shape.

It was a speculative venture that raised no more than a glance from the Establishment, who were not much engaged by the dealings of cricketers in search of a payday miles from home. Lillywhite’s team lacked the starry aura of Grace and his amateur elite. The Australasian later called it “by a long way the weakest side that has ever played in the colonies”. It did include – initially, at least – the brilliant but hard-living wicketkeeper Ted Pooley, and the popular seamer Alfred Shaw, who would bowl Test cricket’s first delivery (and would end his career having sent down more overs than he conceded runs). But it was for the most part a team made of nuts-and-bolts cricketers, hardened by the circuit and the toughness of their work. “If Ulyett, Emmett and Hill are specimens of the best fast bowling in England,” The Australasian went on, “all we can say is, they have not showed their proper form, or British bowling has sadly deteriorated.”

Lillywhite was committed to as many fixtures as his squad of 12 could play, and ultimately his tour would turn a fine profit, enough to pay handsome bonuses. With a schedule arranged by Conway, the team docked in Western Australia on November 2, 1876, sailed again for Glenelg and were taken by horse-drawn cab to Adelaide for their first games. They went from there to Sydney, Newcastle, Goulburn, Melbourne, Ballarat, Geelong and back to Sydney, winning only four of their nine fixtures, before the tour diverted to New Zealand for six weeks in mid-January.

As they prepared to sail, and with an eye on the bottom line, Lillywhite thought nothing of accepting an offer to play, on their return to Australia, “a Grand Combination Match” against a team of 11 chosen from New South Wales and Victoria. Money was money, after all, and the fact that they would have to take the field less than 24 hours after they docked back in Melbourne was just part of the business of touring.

In Christchurch, they took on an 18 of Canterbury, where Pooley, nursing an injured finger, accepted a bet offered by a man named Ralph Donkin. Accounts of the wager vary, but centre around odds of 20-1 for guessing the correct score of any Canterbury batter. Pooley laid a shilling apiece that each player would make a duck, and Donkin accepted, without knowing that Pooley was to umpire the Canterbury innings. Eleven of the 18 somehow failed to trouble the scorers and, when Donkin proved either unwilling or unable to pay up, Pooley punched him three times in the face, and broke into his hotel room in search of recompense. Pooley and England’s baggage man, Albert Bramhall, were arrested and held before trial, stranded in New Zealand as the party sailed for Melbourne and the Grand Combination Match.

Lillywhite arrived sans wicketkeeper, but to some welcome news. The prospect of an 11-a-side match had proven so popular that Conway had shifted the venue from the East Melbourne Club – much to their chagrin – to the MCG, previously unavailable as Fred Grace had reserved it for his tour. It was the first time a touring English team had faced opponents on equal terms, and the notion was playing into those new and nationalistic feelings stirred up by Grace and the meaning of exile.

Lillywhite dragged his weary men towards history, feeling the sway of the sea as they changed into their kit. It was the 19th match of the tour, and they were still weeks from home. What happened next carried weight only retrospectively, but what weight it would be.

Jon Hotten is the author of seven books, including The Meaning of Cricket.

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