Lives in Cricket No 2 - Johnny Briggs

Chapter Eleven Touring with Stod ‘No cricketer who ever lived was so much the child of nature as Briggs.’ Neville Cardus The 1894/95 tourists, under the leadership of Stoddart, set sail for Australia from England on 21 September aboard the 6,814 ton Ophir . The ship belonged, like the SS Orient , to the Orient Line under its previous guise of the Orient Steam Navigation Company. They made one stop on the way at Colombo where they played a game on 16 October, in which Briggs had the locals in all sorts of trouble, taking 6 for 6. Briggs continued to be an automatic selection for tours even though, once again, the party consisted of only 13 players, including Peel, chosen more in the position of all-rounder than Briggs. Cricket was improving at a rate of knots down under and individual colony sides, encouraged perhaps by the Sheffield Shield competition, were much stronger and capable of taking on the tourists on an eleven-a-side basis. In all, Stoddart’s side played 12 first-class matches, many on excellent pitches – a far cry from previous strips. Odds matches were played in far-flung country towns and though eleven of these were scheduled they were far less prevalent than on previous visits. Stoddart was a late developer, not taking up the game seriously until he was 22. He was, however, a man of immeasurable stamina, scoring 485 in 370 minutes for Hampstead against the Stoics – at the time a world individual record – and all this after spending the entire night before the match playing poker. But that wasn’t the end of his activities – he spent the rest of the afternoon playing tennis and rounded off the day with a dinner party that evening! He led England on two of his four tours to Australia becoming the first captain to put Australia in and the first to declare an England innings closed. But as he grew older his health began to deteriorate and he found it hard to come to terms with his growing physical frailties. In his later years he was also burdened by financial problems and he shot himself three weeks after his 52nd birthday. 66