Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

74 exhausted travellers, and they took their chances as best they could with local accommodation, eventually securing berths at the Merchant’s Hotel on Fourth Street. Constructed in 1837 on the original site of the University of Pennsylvania, the Merchant’s was renowned for its pioneering use of speaking tubes instead of the sonorous gongs used to summon guests at the remainder of the city’s hostelries. Given the trying and tedious nature of the English party’s trip to Philadelphia, such a provision was a true act of compassion! Part of the difficulty in finding quarters was the election fever that was gripping the whole of Pennsylvania. Willsher’s men rode into town with only a month to go before the first national vote since the end of the Civil War in 1865, and even at this late stage the outcome was in doubt. Andrew Johnson, who had succeeded Abraham Lincoln as President after the latter’s assassination in April 1865, was unable to secure the Democratic nomination for a further term, so it was Horatio Seymour that entered the fray against the Republican’s populist choice of war hero Ulysses S.Grant. The main issue at stake was the matter of what became known as ‘Reconstruction’, the essential difference between the two parties being that Johnson wanted peaceful reconciliation with the South, while Grant was in the hands of the ‘Radical Republicans’, who urged a more punitive approach. This seems at odds with Grant’s campaign slogan of ‘let us have peace’, but more characteristic of the electioneering was a concerted assault on Seymour’s character of which modern spin-doctors would be proud. As it transpired, the result in Pennsylvania was fairly representative of that across the country, with Grant securing 52.2 per cent of the popular vote. Despite an embarrassing loss in New York, at the age of 46 Grant became the youngest United States president at that time, and remained popular enough to be re-elected for a second term in 1872. Against this background, it is unsurprising that Willsher’s tour had a low-key feel to it, even in the cricketing heartland of Philadelphia. Yet there was undoubtedly more interest in the tour than there had been in baseball-hungry New York. A lot of the credit for this had its origins in the ‘apple barrage’ of 1855, when younger members of the Wister and Newhall families, disgruntled at being excluded because of their tender years from a Germantown Cricket Club match being played on the Wister estate, interrupted play by pelting their elders with apples from the family orchard. The incident came to the attention of Thomas A.Newhall, known as Philadelphia’s sugar king, who invited his Cricket on the Brain