Lives in Cricket No 25 - Tom Richardson

8 Chapter One Family Background Thomas Richardson was born in a gypsy caravan – or, at least, of Romany stock - in the Surrey town of Byfleet on 11 August 1870. So say a number of sources. 2 Of Byfleet and 11 August 1870 there can be no doubt. His birth certificate confirms that. The gypsy element, however, seems to be a myth, adding a romantic strain to a distinguished career which the great fast bowler himself seems to have made no attempt to deny. Certainly his looks – black curly hair and ubiquitous Victorian moustache – gave the impression of gypsy ancestry, though there is nothing in his family tree to suggest it. His father was a groom; there is a strong family connection with horses and an Irish strain on his mother’s side. Given that gypsies and the Irish were on the margins of the rigid hierarchy of nineteenth-century society, it does not require a doctorate in social anthropology to understand how the myth may have developed. Censuses on which members of the Richardson family appear reveal them as living in houses, not tents or caravans. They seem to have been itinerant and to have moved around in pursuit of work, but it is a non sequitur to conclude that they were travellers in the sense implied in Masefield’s ‘vagrant gipsy life’. His paternal great-grandfather, who had married Philadelphia Fry (suggesting perhaps a Quaker link, though evidence from the family is that they were Anglican), had ended his days in the Tonbridge Workhouse, and the family connection with horses was not with racehorse ownership or strings of polo ponies, but working with them as grooms and coachmen and mucking out the stables. His grandfather was an agricultural labourer, his father, Henry, a ‘Coachman Domestic’ in 1871 (Coachman and Domestic Servant on Tom’s 1870 birth certificate) and a ‘Carman’ in 1881, by which time Tom’s elder brother Henry was a groom. His mother was born Johanna Elizabeth Bates, daughter of Irish immigrants Thomas and Catherine Bates, the former born in Woodrough and described as an agricultural labourer on the 1841 Census of Population, simply a labourer ten years later. They were in England by the time Johanna was born in 1837. Both the 1841 and 1851 Censuses find the family living in Putney: Johanna, aged 14 (rounded up to 15) is a ‘scholar’, so there is an element of education twenty years before state legislation made it compulsory. 2 Ralph Barker Ten Great Bowlers p 67 Phil Edmonds 100 Greatest Bowlers p 30 David Frith The First Great Test Series p 29 The Fast Men p 61 D.L.A.Jephson Cricketer 23 September 1922 p 17 Simon Wilde The World’s Best Batsmen and Bowlers p 80