Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

59 Edgar too would have been content that the frenetic round of negotiations was finally over and the real business could commence. As he boarded the S.S. City of Baltimore at Liverpool on 2 September, he could only hope that the passage would be a lot smoother than that of the Nova Scotian nine years before. Certainly, there was no lack of modern technology at the disposal of ship’s captain Robert Leitch. Built in 1855 by Tod and McGregor of Glasgow for the Inman Line, City of Baltimore was a three- masted, iron-hulled, single-screw steamship weighing in at 2,368 tons, with a top speed of 10 knots. Initially she was chartered by the French in the Crimean war, before starting her first commercial journeys between Liverpool and Philadelphia in 1856. In 1866 she was reconditioned with new engines and boilers and resumed passages to New York, now via Queenstown in County Cork. However, all this meant nothing if the Atlantic threw up any of the ‘equinoctial gales’ that plagued the 1859 trip, described at comic length by Fred Lillywhite. Fred’s brother John, along with Alfred Clarke, was there to see off the intrepid travellers, and he would have had a particular professional interest in doing so, as his Companion was the only publication, apart from some of the newspapers, to give the tour any coverage. Presumably cousin James was deputed to provide the account that eventually appeared in the 1869 edition, as he was later to collaborate in the production of the family annual, Captain of England Willsher’s side made their transatlantic crossing on the S.S. City of Baltimore, of a modest 2,400 tons, here seen taking on oceanic weather.