STORIES ABOUT THE ASHES are to cricket a little like books on Elizabeth I are to history. The well versed are inclined to heave a sigh and mutter “not another one”. No one, however, should imagine Cricket’s Burning Passion to be just another account of the already well examined subject of the origin of the Ashes. The title of Scyld Berry and Rupert Peploe’s illuminating and engrossing account of the 1882-83 England tour of Australia, the series that turned a newspaper joke into the symbol of the oldest sporting rivalry of all, is a double entendre.
The second burning passion was that felt for Miss Florence Morphy, of Melbourne, by the Hon Ivo Bligh, the captain of the team that set sail on the
SS Peshawur before the 1882 Australian tour of England had itself run its course. Florence — of Irish origins and governess to the children of the landowners Sir William and Janet Clarke, in Victoria — was just 21 and beautiful both in her character and her features. She swept the 23-year-old England captain off his feet almost from the moment that they met at Rupertswood, the Clarkes’ country home near Melbourne.
Among matters raised in this unusually well-researched story is the effect that the emotional state of a cricketer must have on his performance. Those watching or reporting from the fringe seldom have much insight into domestic affairs that may be churning through the mind of a batsman preparing to face a fast bowler.
Cricket demands total concentration and focus at each of its myriad critical moments. Not only did Bligh have a disappointing tour as a batsman for reasons that had more to do with being in love than any lack of a straight bat or balanced eyes, but Fred Spofforth, the demon Australian bowler, went wicketless even on a drying pitch in the second England innings in the first Test, probably because his only brother was seriously ill.
It is well documented that Spofforth’s superb spell had sparked Australia’s success against the odds in The Oval Test of 1882. The authors — cricket research and most of the words by Berry, with much new insight into the Darnleys from Peploe, the great-grandson of Ivo and Florence — waste no more time on the background to the tour than is necessary to put events into perspective.
Most will know that the origin of the Ashes was an announcement in the Sporting Times, wittily compiled by Reginald Brooks, the son of an editor of Punch. The notice was placed “in affectionate remembrance of English Cricket, which died at The Oval on 29th August, 1882”. The footnote that the body would be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia is equally well known — but not the fact that, apart from its cricketing significance, the mock obituary was a topical reference to a debate raging in the early 1880s about the rights and wrongs of cremating, rather than burying, bodies.
This is one of many insights in a story that reveals even more that is unfamiliar about its hero, Bligh, and his family than it does about the cricket matches, which are covered to just the right depth. It is a small complaint that occasional repetitions, both of fact and of phraseology, sometimes mar the general seamlessness of the narrative. Sharper editing might have avoided, for instance, one chapter ending “it proved one of the most combustible of all Test matches” and the next beginning: “Among the half dozen most controversial matches ever played.”
Few would dispute the contention, however. The third Test at Sydney was a tense contest and a tough one. Australia had won the first game and England the second, both at Melbourne, each result owing much to the successful side’s good fortune in winning the toss and batting first. The teams sailed to Sydney on the same ship for the match that would determine who would claim the Ashes. A fierce contest ended in a 69-run win for Bligh’s men, whereupon, it seems, the demon Spofforth aimed a couple of punches at Richard Barlow and Walter Read as the English eleven left the field.
No doubt he was provoked. Earlier in the series Barlow had been obliged to change his studded boots because the Australians thought they were roughing up the pitch. At Sydney, the touring team objected to Spofforth’s habit of following through close to the stumps and twisting his heavy boot into the turf, thereby, if unwittingly, making batting much more difficult. What would umpire Hair have made of it all? The general view after England had prevailed was that Bligh’s mission had ended in triumph but a fourth game was played against a Combined Victoria-New South Wales team. The home side won and it was claimed by some Australians that the Ashes — still a novel concept, having only just acquired a physical being in the form of a red velvet bat and a terracotta urn containing ashes from what was probably a burnt bail — had in fact been retained.
The verdict of these authors, as of most historians, is that it was the three-match series against the Australian team led by W. L. Murdoch — the captain of the side that had won at The Oval — that counted.
Bligh duly returned home with the little trophy and put it on his mantelpiece at Cobham Hall, in Kent. In later years two different people claimed to have knocked the urn by accident into the hearth, hastily refilling it with replacement ashes from the spent fire before Bligh, by now Lord Darnley, noticed. It was of much more importance to him, however, that, having overcome some parental resistance, he returned to Australia in 1884 and married his beloved Florence.
One can enjoy Cricket’s Burning Passion as cricket history, social history or simply as the engrossing and touching account of a likeable young English aristocrat meeting, wooing and winning the love of his life. The marriage, like Ivo’s later life, had vicissitudes but she, the seventh child of an Australian police magistrate, became Countess of Darnley, friend and confidante of Queen Mary, a wartime philanthropist and eventually a Dame of the British Empire.
EXTRACT from CRICKET’S BURNING PASSION
There is more, however, to the tradition of the Ashes than winning and losing, however long the timescale. What Bligh did, unlike previous English cricket captains, was to set out on a quest which touched a chord in the national consciousness. Here, for the first time in cricket, was the oldest of human narratives: a story of life, then death, followed by a quest which ends successfully in regeneration.
For Australians, the Ashes have their own significance. To hold them is to prove their manhood, their own fitness as a nation. The overtones are social, cultural, psychological. The offspring of the Mother Country has proved stronger than the parent when Australia hold the Ashes. Australia defeating England at cricket was part of the process which ended in the colonies standing on their own independent feet . . . in 1901.
For the English follower of cricket, there is another resonance, a deeper one, which it is no exaggeration to say is mystical, even religious. The Ashes have often been called cricket’s “Holy Grail”. The myth of the Holy Grail is confined to Western Christendom . . .
When Bligh set forth to Australia, in a less secular age than today, he was frequently called “St Ivo”, especially in verse in popular periodicals, English and Australian. Partly this must have been because he was surely the saintliest man to captain England at cricket, before or since. But also, from the outset, the English attempt to regain the Ashes had these religious overtones, both as a quest to regain the equivalent of the Holy Grail, and of a crusade. The body of English cricket had been killed and seized from its rightful sepulchre, and now St Ivo was leading the attempt to recover the ashes . . . He was another knight on another romantic quest. The parallels even extended to the object of the quest being a cup or “graal” in medieval English. The difference between the grail and the urn lay merely in the contents.
