Lives in Cricket No 2 - Johnny Briggs

Bates, who played eleven seasons for Yorkshire, died of natural causes after catching a cold at the funeral of a fellow Yorkshire player, John Thewlis. In the days after the funeral, Bates’ condition worsened and he passed away. He was 45. The tourists whiled away the long hours on board ship with games of deck cricket, whist drives, concerts and a fancy-dress ball as well as other sporting entertainments. Briggs won a potato race, finished second in a hopping race and gained another second place, together with the Nottinghamshire left-hander William Scotton, in the three-legged race. This tour was run, once again, as a commercial enterprise under the stewardship of Shaw, Shrewsbury and Lillywhite, but it was neither as profitable nor as arduous as the previous tour in which Briggs had participated. However, in terms of quality of players it gained greater recognition. Wisden described the side as ‘one of the strongest that ever left England for the colonies’ which underlines the position Briggs had attained in the game in 1885 and 1886. On the travelling side, the tourists were spared their previous excursion to Queensland which chopped many miles off their itinerary. But there was still plenty of cricket to be played with a total of 29 matches, ten of which were deemed to be first-class and they still had the likes of the twenty-twos of Cootamundra, Bowral and Ballarat with which to contend. As a consequence the 13-strong playing party was fully stretched over 76 days of cricketing action, leaving little room for manoeuvre in terms of illness and injury. The normally injury-prone Briggs seems to have escaped unscathed from this tour, but Billy Barnes wasn’t so lucky. He was hurt in a fight, which resulted in the little-known Reginald Wood, a public schoolboy seemingly down on his luck, being co-opted into the touring party for three matches, including one Test. Wood, from Birkenhead, had played alongside Briggs for Lancashire between 1880 and 1884. He played for Birkenhead Park and for Liverpool and District, emigrating to Australia in 1885. He later became a professional coach at East Melbourne CC and later at Melbourne CC and at the Albert club in Sydney. On the 1886/87 tour, Shaw’s side played many warm-up matches prior to the initial Test and Briggs had had two five-wicket hauls (against New South Wales and in the first of two matches against an Australian XI) and had scored a useful 69 in the second match against an Australian XI. In contrast to his previous tour, Briggs 36 Coming of age as a cricketer