Lives in Cricket No 21 - Walter Read

60 Surrey amateur was playing some very good cricket’) and 55 against Eighteen of Ballarat where, as at Newcastle, he was the ‘chief contributor’. The story of ‘The Ashes’ has passed into cricket folklore – how after England’s unexpected and humiliating defeat at The Oval in 1882 a mock obituary in the Sporting Times lamented the death of English cricket, the body of which would be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. Those ‘ashes’ became tangible in the form of a terracotta urn presented to captain Ivo Bligh the following Christmas in Melbourne by his future wife, Florence Morphy. Not until Pelham Warner’s tour of 1903/04 did the sporting icon become of public significance. Until then, The Ashes remained something of a private joke with occasional press references. Walter Read, however, along with several of his colleagues is immortalised in the Victorian doggerel that passes for an inscription on the urn, now played for every two years or so between England and Australia, seen then as the mother country and the colonial upstarts. Australia 1882/83 and 1887/88 Hon Ivo Bligh’s team which toured Australia 1882/83.