Lives in Cricket No 4 - Ernie Jones

greatest fast bowlers’. For the season Jones took 76 wickets at 21.75 in eleven games, to head both the national aggregates and averages. He took five wickets in an innings nine times and ten wickets in a match on three occasions. One event which would have had an impact on Jones was the death of his four-month-old daughter, Thelma, from diarrhoea. This occurred on 23 February, the day after Jones’ triumph over New South Wales at the SCG, and three days before the final Test at the same ground. It is difficult to know exactly how he dealt with the tragedy as there are no newspaper reports of the death, but as Pat Jalland has argued in her book, Death in the Victorian Family , most people believed that the death of a child was distressing and incapacitating, and even devout Christians found it difficult to accept their loss. While diarrhoea was a common killer in the first year of life, and there was a high incidence of infant mortality in Victorian families, it was not true that parents loved their children less. For Jones’ wife it was no doubt, a difficult time as she worked through the process of grief in the week surrounding the funeral. It is imagined that she had a support of family members and sympathetic friends and neighbours, but the business of death – arranging the funeral, notifying the district registrar of its cause, selection of a burial plot and so on – would have had to be made without her husband attending, as he did not return from Sydney until 5 March, ten days later. When he did, he took no part in club cricket for North Adelaide for which his season’s bowling analysis was 9 wickets for 58 runs in just two matches. Family came first for a while. It is presumed that Jones stoically accepted the tragedy but many diseases claimed a greater proportion of victims among members of the working classes than among the middle and upper classes. Much of the west end of the city involved close settlement and it was an unhealthy environment. When a new Public Health Act was passed in South Australia in 1898 it paid particular attention to infectious diseases such as typhoid, diphtheria and tuberculosis, and unhygienic practices regarding the contamination of food and drink. Fifty slaughterhouses operated in the city at this time, most being open blood-spattered yards behind the butchers’ shops which existed in residential streets. Mortality was often preventable, but ignorance was chiefly to blame as one doctor noted in his report of a household where a child was dying of typhoid. The parents ran a The Great Fast Bowler: 1896-1899 39