Lives in Cricket No 21 - Walter Read

58 Chapter Six Australia 1882/83 and 1887/88 Read’s performances during the 1882 season, though not up to the standard of the previous season, were still sufficient for him to be invited to join the Hon Ivo Bligh on the seventh tour of Australia by an English team. Not until the twentieth century when touring teams were selected by and represented the MCC did such teams reflect the full strength of English cricket, being predominantly professional or predominantly amateur. This was the latter. In fact the original intention had been to take a team comprising solely Cambridge University men but there were issues of availability and other commitments, and eventually the nine amateurs (subsequently reduced to eight as Alfred Lucas withdrew for family reasons) were supplemented by four professionals taken along to do the bowling. That is an over- simplistic, but not entirely inaccurate analysis. Bligh’s team has passed into cricketing folklore as being the first one to recapture ‘The Ashes’, though no one attached much significance to it at the time and history has embroidered the events on that tour with a significance they did not possess then. From Read’s point of view, the tour had more positives than negatives and was the forerunner of similarly successful ones (at least from a playing point of view) to Australia again and later to South Africa. He did not have the best of starts, however, a duck on the stopover in Colombo against a local Eighteen (comprised mainly of members of the garrison) being followed by five in a drawn match against South Australia, then playing on for one in the first first-class fixture of the tour against Victoria in Melbourne. The matches are reported in detail in the Sporting Life and reproduced in Cricket under the anonymous authorship of One of Them – i e one of the team, identity unknown, but probably Read. In Cricket’s Burning Passion Scyld Berry surmises that Read had the literacy and would have found the payment useful. He does not confine himself to cricket reporting and adds a bit of