We tell a lot of Ashes stories. But Australia and England faced each other on five Test tours before the Ashes legend was created, and earlier still, before the Test era, three other teams from England visited the colonies. Let's go back to the first of these, and one of the biggest upsets of them all.
Cricket in the 1800s was mostly public entertainment offered by private operators. The modern spectator might not part with their cash to watch a few gents batting with twigs scoring one run per over on a rural shitheap, but in that era there was rarely much to do except catch the plague and talk to sheep. So teams travelled all over, partly made up of working-class professional players, partly of upper-class supposed amateurs, who were usually discreetly paid "expenses" that greatly exceeded their team-mates' wages. If crowds turned up and paid entry, tours were lucrative. If not, they lost money heavily.
Nor was touring specific to cricket. Musicians, actors, sideshows, demonstrations of strength or skill - all sorts of performers traipsed from town to town looking for their next payday. And with international maritime transport having become commonplace, big attractions from England could make big money elsewhere.
This earning potential drew the interest of two Melbourne restaurant owners, Mr Spiers and Mr Pond. It was 1862, the gold rush was ending and a depression was on the way. These two wanted to diversify. Originally they invited novelist Charles Dickens for a speaking and reading tour. He was interested but the plan fell through. As they cast around for alternatives, they heard a story from 1859, when cricket touring had first gone international. An All-England team went to North America, including a chap whose name offered classic English floridity: Heathfield Harman Stephenson. The tour had made bank. Spiers and Pond were down. They offered Stevo a gig.
Our bloke had a long all-round career bowling what was recorded as "round-arm fast". Make of that what you will: we guess that his pace was pedestrian at best, but the ratty pitches of the day made it do all sorts. He played for nearly 20 years, a lot for Surrey with a bunch of other sides thrown in, including England representative teams against county opponents. With international cricket not yet born, that was the highest you could go: an England player without a Test cap. He did allegedly get bought a fancy hat once, by crowd donation, after taking three wickets in three balls, which is one of the unproven theories about why we call it a "hat-trick". And he definitely umpired the first Test ever played in England.
Spiers and Pond made a good bet. When Stevo's team of Englishmen arrived, it was huge news. Melbourne's population was 125,000, and an estimated 10,000 of them came to the docks to greet the team's ship. For the opening match against a Victorian side, 15,000 showed up, and the estimate over four days was 55,000. That included the governor, the premier, and cabinet ministers. It was a carnival, with one lunch break including the country's first ascent of a hot-air balloon.
Described by English player William Caffyn, the scene on morning one sounded no different to Boxing Day morning now: "The National Anthem was played as we entered the field, amidst the silence of the vast concourse of spectators. When the band stopped playing a tremendous burst of cheering rent the air. The weather was so hot as to fetch the skin off some of our faces."
The Vics got pumped, their second innings including ten ducks and a nought not out. Does that mean they didn't make any runs? No, they made 91, because they had 18 players. This was the other factor. The touring team was made of hardened county players, and a money-making trip needed the promise of competitiveness. So teams like these would travel to any town, field their best 11 and let the hosts play 15 or 18 or 22. A sporting handicap let the pros show off their skills without a mismatch ending the game too quickly.
The team went all over: Ovens District, Geelong, Bathurst, Hobart, Ballarat, Bendigo, and several bigger games in Melbourne and Sydney. As the far more powerful side, they kept playing against teams with more players and kept beating them, often by an innings. They lost twice all tour. The first took a combined team from the best of Victoria and New South Wales, fielding 22 players to the English 11, that still barely scraped over the line. Ending at 35 for 9 in the chase, with nobody having passed single figures, the colonial team probably would have lost if chasing 30 more.
The other loss, though, was right at the other end of the scale for supposed advantage. Yes, it was still to 22 players, but they were 22 farmers and knockabouts, residents of the small Victorian town of Castlemaine, who made their fortress at the local ground named Wattle Flat.
Everyone was there. "On the occasion of the grand match yesterday, business was almost entirely suspended in the town, and most of the surrounding districts were similarly affected," reported the Castlemaine Advertiser. England got bowled out for 80, but that wasn't a bad score in that era. A feller from down the road at Fryers Creek named John Webster Amos took 7 for 13.
But as soon as England took the ball, Stevo nabbed the first wicket, and boy did it roll on. For a sequence on a scorecard, try reading this aloud. 0, 5, 0, 17, 3, 2, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 10, 1, 0, 1, 0, 2, 3 not out, 1, 0, 1, 0.
So that's ten ducks and five ones, out of 22 batters, in a score of 54. George Griffith for the tourists took 13 wickets for 18 runs, and while the scorer might just have got lazy noting down catches, the card suggests that 12 of them were bowled. It must have been a brutal effort to be subjected to, and on that showing, a deficit of 26 for Castlemaine might as well have been a thousand.
But the local lads were not discouraged. Our friend Amos only added one wicket in the third innings, but his team-mate John Brooker cleaned up with 6 for 6. That kept the English to a manageable 68, and Stevo was pissed. The skipper, reported the local paper, spouted off at the lunch break: "in explanation of the bad fortune that had attended the Englishmen in that day's play, [Stephenson] said that he attributed it entirely to the bad ground". Sure, classic - blame the facilities.
Picture the chaos of this match. Our research might be faulty, but apparently teams of 22 players didn't just have a longer batting order; they were allowed to have them all fielding at the same time. These English pros would have been trying to work the ball into the smallest gaps or hit over thickets of fielders. In the meantime, the whole third innings happened on the Saturday, so the entire town and district would have been down there cheering every wicket. The home team would have merged into the home supporters near the boundary line, an indistinguishable and claustrophobic mass of humanity surrounding them.
Even so, when normal service resumed in the fourth innings with the regulation 13 players on the pitch, the scores in the match and Castlemaine's first showing with the bat suggested that 95 was too many to chase. But by stumps on Saturday, they were still in the game at 40 for 4. In the circumstances, first drop Robert Manning making 11 was a significant score. More importantly, Charles Makinson - who would later play twice for Victoria - was 19 not out. The town sat through church on Sunday daring to hope.
On Monday, Makinson went on to 36, including the only boundary of the innings, before being bowled. The card proceeded much like the first innings: 4, 0, 3, 2, 3, 1, 1, 2, 0, 0, 1, 3. But, crucially, there were fewer ducks. Each tiny score brought the target closer. Between times they kept hustling, taking byes and leg-byes, the extras total mounting past 10, past 15, up towards 20. But the wicket column was doing the same. Castlemaine had already been hurt up top by Griffith again, then saw a run of wickets through the middle for Charles Lawrence, who went on to emigrate to Australia and would later captain the Aboriginal XI tour to England of 1868.
Lawrence bagged the 14th wicket, the 15th, the 16th. Nerves jangled. A tiny partnership of 6 or 7 saw the score creep within a few runs of the target. Then another wicket for Lawrence, dismissing the player for 3, and another for Griffith, a duck.
Castlemaine had their No. 20 at the crease, with two left in the sheds. Being carded at 21 or 22 would not do wonders for the confidence. Those three players collectively had scored one run in the first innings. But out there with them was the fabulously named Joseph Dolphin, ready to launch a Flipper rescue. Sure, his innings totalled 6 not out, but it was a 6 not out that would reverberate through the life of the town. With the winning strike, Dolphin carried Castlemaine past their target, not to 95 runs but to 96. Like Forrest Gump, he just kept on running.
So the boys from Castlemaine won the match at Wattle Flat, defeating England's finest by making 150 runs across two innings. Griffith added 9 for 28 in the second dig, another seven of them bowled, so had match figures of 22 wickets for 46, but the locals were still the ones who got to celebrate.
"It has been reserved for the Castlemaine district to achieve a victory which other much more pretentious districts failed to win," crowed the Mount Alexander Mail. They were less happy about the English blaming the deck. "It strikes us that this mode of accounting for the victory of the Castlemaine men sounds very like twaddle," the paper continued. "No doubt it is annoying to be defeated by a number of amateur cricketers, but... whatever might have been the demerits of the ground, it was played on by both sides."
Ding ding ding, cricket cliché jar. A hundred years later, the people of Castlemaine were still sufficiently pleased with themselves to put up a plaque commemorating the win, which England's then-captain Colin Cowdrey agreed to unveil. He was the fifth touring skipper to visit Castlemaine, because such was the respect given to Wattle Flat following Stevo's trip that three later touring sides also played matches there, the little ground hosting some of the greatest to play the game.
WG Grace took his team there in 1874, and his key bowler was England's first Test captain, James Lillywhite, who took ten wickets in each innings. Ivo Bligh's team played Castlemaine during the first Ashes tour in 1882, and in 1887, cricket's great party boy AE Stoddart walked away with 8 for 27, and we can only hope that Castlemaine then gave him a good night on the tiles.
The team continued to hold its own, with Grace's team winning narrowly and the other two matches drawn. Eventually, Wattle Flat cricket ground became a pony club and a recreation area, and there is no longer an oval where those games were played. But they say that some ghosts may be heard when you pass by the cricket ground: mostly Heathfield Harman Stephenson complaining about the pitch.