Clem Hill's Reminiscences

Chapter Five His Second English Tour, 1899 Joe Darling led the first of his three Australian teams to England in 1899, when five Tests were played for the first time. Australia won the Second Test at Lord’s by ten wickets when Hill and Victor Trumper both made centuries and Ernest Jones skittled the opposition with his pace. The visitors held the upper hand in most of the drawn games. In the first, at the first ever Test at Nottingham, W.G.Grace played his last game for England and Wilfred Rhodes and Trumper made their debuts for England and Australia respectively. The Third Test at Leeds was played on a pitch made lively by heavy rain so that Australia’s first three batsmen dismissed – Jim Kelly, Monty Noble and Syd Gregory – all recorded ducks. England topped Australia by 48, so that when Hearne took a second innings hat-trick (Noble, Gregory and Hill) the visitors trailed by nine runs with five wickets standing, but the reserve bowlers were unable to make the necessary breakthrough. At Manchester, the Fourth Test was a great match saved for Australia by the obduracy of Noble. The final Test at The Oval was a heavy scoring affair with little possibility of a result. 10 ‘You’re a cheat!’ Laver’s outburst against English umpire ‘You’re a cheat!’ In the last stages of a Test match at Trent Bridge in 1899 that is what Australian player Frank Laver called an English umpire. The Marylebone Cricket Club decided to remove the umpire from all future matches in which the Australians were engaged. 30 Ranjitsinhji, the batsman, was so certain that he was out that he started to run off to the grandstand, and was called back by the umpire. He resumed, and was able, by a long and patient innings, to ward off defeat. The match was drawn. Clem Hill writes of this unsatisfactory decision in this tenth article of his series. The Australian team which went to England in 1899, under the captaincy of Darling, won one test and four were drawn. Harry Trott had dropped out of the team, and new men to visit England were Noble, Trumper, Howell, C.McLeod, and Laver. Englishmen we met for the first time in Tests included Fry, Quaife, W.Rhodes, J.T.Tyldesley, Jessop, A.O.Jones, Lockwood and Mead. 44 30 The umpire concerned was R.G. (Dick) Barlow who was on the English list of first-class umpires from 1894 to 1919, and who is usually referred to as ‘much respected’. This was his only Test match and, although he umpired 289 further first-class matches after the incident, he stood only once more in any match involving an Australian touring side, against Surrey in 1905. Oddly enough, Barlow and Ranji are known to have disliked one another intensely.