The First England/Australia Cricket Tour

Nothing it seems excites the ardent cricket fan more than the Ashes, a series of test matches that has been played between the England and Australia since 1882.

However the first time the two countries met was in 1868 and was unique in the fact that all the members of the Australian team were indigenous Australians.

It was on the cattle stations of Victoria where they worked as stockmen that they learnt the rules of the game and were soon playing against the settlers.

The matches proved so popular that it wasn't long before they came to the attention of two members of the Edenhope Cricket Club William Hayman, who had emigrated from England some years before, and Tom Hamilton.

Both men were impressed by the skill and athletisism of the team that they arranged for them to be coached by one of Australias most famous cricketers Tom Wills, as well as being a fine cricketer Tom Willis is credited as being one of the founders of Australian Rules Football.

Most, judging by his sporting prowess and the fact that he had grown up among theaboriginies and speaking their language, would have agreed that he was a good choice but Tom Wills was a complex man. 

His Grandfather had been transported to Australian having been found guilty of highway robbery, unlike today when having a 'convict' for an ancestor is a matter of some pride to Tom it was quite the reverse, the 'convict stain' was something he felt all his life and it lead him to become an advocate for those emancipated convicts who sufferered discrimination by many of the institutions including the Melbourne Cricket Club, and it is an achievement of this advocacy and his personality that even with his convict heritage Tom Wills became an important member of the MCC.

Tom's father Horatio however found that being the son of a man transported for highway robbery held no restraints on his ambition. In 1840 he became the first white settler to cross the Murray river to Ararat in Victoria. 

By the time he arrived at Ararat, which he named for the mountain on which the biblical ark was supposed to have settlehe already was a man of property. So together with him was his family, stockmen and  animals. The house he built there named 'Lexington' which is now on the National Heritage List.

Twelve years later he moved south of Geelong where he became a member of Victoria's parliament. With this new fund respectability he was determined to give his son Tom a good education. To this purpose at the age of fourteen young Tom was sent of across the world to England where he became a pupil at rugby school.

Although not a very academic student he excelled at sport and soon became captain of the school's cricket team and played the relatively new game of rugby, a game which had been 'invented' by William Webb Ellis when as a pupil he attended the school a few years before. During his time at Rugby he became known as one of the best cricketers in England.

He arrived back in Australia in 1856 when he was twenty-one where in 1859 his sporting prowess lead him, with others, to set up the rules for 'Australian Rules Football' although Tom was a fan of rugby he decided against incorporating it's rules into the new came because the ground in Australia was deemed 'too hard' compared with than in England. Finally the rules were set and Tom Wills is quoted as saying '' we shall have a game of our own''.

Two years after this his father Horatio Wills decided to leave his property in Brisbane and move to Queensland. This trek which was 800 miles north included women and children who travelled in bullock wagons and stockmen, including Tom who drove the 10.000 sheep. After eight months they reached their destination of Cullin-La-Ringo.

The first few days were spent erecting tents which would become their temporary homes and seeing to the stock, during this time the local tribe of aboriginals were given access to their camp, and Horatio who was used to having friendly relations with the tribes in Brisbane sought the same with those who wandered in and out of the settlement, at first it would be just a few passing through but gradually as the days passed more and more came until they numbered about fifty. whether the Wills saw this as a threat or just inquisitiveness we shall never know but they must have prayed it was the latter.

In the second week after their arrival Tom and three others left the camp to go to Albinia Station for supplies, the round trip would take a week. By this time the camp had settled into a routine the women sewed and washed the clothes while others watched the children as they played, the men built fences and tended to the stock while the cook in his tent prepared the meals for the day.

A few days after Tom and the others departure the aborigines came into the settlement as usual, this time there was nothing usual about their motives. This time instead of passing through as usual they milled around the camp until each was next to one of the Wills party, whether anyone noticed that each member of the aboriginal tribe were holding their hands behind their backs is not known but when a warcry rang out it was all to clear, and too late.

Hearing that sound Horatio grabbed his pistol and ran out of his tent but before he had the chance to fire one bullet he was felled by a tribesman waiting outside who brought the heavy tribal club down on his head, then the carnage began, children who ran to the mothers for protection were cut down as they ran never reaching the safety of their mothers arms, though little safety would be found there for they were to share the same fate as their children.

One man, the cook, was the only witness to the slaughter, he had been taking a break from the heat of his kitchen tent when the killing began. Gradually he made his way towards some of the men were working in a far pasture. After relating to them what had happened he joined them as they hurried back to the camp.

The scene that greeted them was one of complete horror, among the ransacked  camp lay the battered and bloodied bodies of ten men, two women and most heartbreakingly seven children. There was nothing else they could do for their friends except see to it they were buried decently. 

Tom and the others returned after the burials were completed and one can only imagine how they felt, if something like this had happened today they would hve been given help to cope with the post traumatic stress and the guilt feelings of being by chance the ones to have escaped the massacre. So this not being available Tom used alcohol as a way to blot out the thoughts of the fear and panic that must have occured that day.

Over the years Tom's alcoholism grew worse until he descended into madness and finally commited suicide, so perhaps Tom could be regarded as a victim of the massacre too.

However to return to the subject of this piece the first cricket match between Emgland and Australia. In 1866 Tom Wills coached an all aboriginal team with a veiw to bringing them to England, the finances were in place and the team travelled to Sydney only to find all the money had been embezelled by a Captain Gurnett who had been entrusted to set up all the travel arrangements. Following this set back Tome seems to give over his place as coach to Charles Lawrence a Surrey cricketer.

Two years later in spite of a deal of pressure not to let the tour go ahead, even so the only way the team could leave Australia was for them the pretend to be fishermen, the ruse was successful and soon they were aboard the 'Parrametta' and heading for England.

After many weeks at sea the team arrived at Gravesend and began their gruelling tour. They played forty seven matches over a six month period of which they wn fourteen, lost fourteen and drew nineteen. As well as playing cricket they also exhibited some of their native skills such as boomarang and spear throwing, also Dick a Dick one of the players would hold a shield and invite members of the public to throw cricket balls at him and he would parry them off with his shield, it's reported he was never hit once.

They arrived in London in May 1868 and a month later one of the team King Cole (he is the one with his foot up on the chair in the above photo) became seriously ill, once he was hospitalised it was diagnosed that he was suffering from tubercolosis from which he later died at Guys Hospital London on the 24th June.

His body wasn't returned to Australia to be buried his home state of  Victoria but in the Victoria Park cemetery Tower Hamlets, perhaps it was the coincidence of the name that he was interred there.

The Victoria Park cemetery was started by a private company in 1845 intending to take advantage of the shortage of burial space in the local churchyards. Hoping to make it a viable concern it soon became aware this wasn't to be for Tower Hamlets was one of the poorest boroughs in London and with the high rate of infantile mortality it was the poor who became their clients.

It was described as Arthur H Beavan in his survey of London cemeteries as such:'' Victoria Park cemetery, a dismal place, passed on the Great Eastern Line beyond Bethnal Green, is thickly studded with childrens graves, chiefly of the poorer classes from the overcrowded parishes from round about.

Pathetic indeed were the efforts made by the sorrowing parents to adorn the little mounds where their treasures lay; scallop and mussel shell, glass vases, bead work, miscellaneous china and tinsel ornaments, were all pressed into service: for flowers would not grow well, and the hardiest shrubs drooped and withered in the uncongenial soil and the atmosphere of this part of east London.

In 1853 the cemetery went bankrupt but it carried on when one of the directors bought the business, from then until 1876 there were130 burials on sundays, but also nearly as many complaints because the ground wasn't consecrated.When it closed in 1876 it became a place where undesirables gathered on a daily basis. In 1884 the Disused Burial Gounds Act came into force which prevented any building on the site so the following year it became a recreational ground.

When churchyards are sold off to be built on the remains are moved and the ground unconsecrated, but this doesn't apply to Victoria Park Cemetery for it was never conscrated when burials took place in the years gone by.

''In 1891 the space was regarded as 'a disgrace' and was taken over by the 'Metropolitan Public Gardens Association' with the aim of creating a public park which was opened in 1894 by the Duke of York and renamed Meath Gardens.If they do perhaps they wonder like me about what happened to the remains of the hundreds of east enders who were buried there.

I haven't been able to find whether the remains were moved but if they were why leave those of King Cole was he considered not to be a Christian and that is why he was left, or is he just one among hundreds, many of them the ancestors of those living nearby, that lie beneath the grassy stretches of the park who unlike King Cole have been forgotten and unmourned.

To return to King Cole who was buried there in 1858 it should be noted that a Eucalyptus tree, a symbol of his native land, was planted on his grave in 1988.

The tree is still there above his grave and it's said that every Australian cricket touring team that comes to England pays its respect to King Cole at the site of the old distorted tree, the green space in which it stands is now called Meath Gardens.

In 2001 the Indigenous youth cricket team of came to England from Australia bringing with them a pot of red ochre, and together with invited members of the local youth they sprinkled the ochre around the tree during a ceremony of symbolic respect.

Apart from the Eucalyptus tree and a small plaque marking the resting place of King Cole, native name Bripumyarrinin, the only thing left of the Victoria Park Cemetery is the original gate.

'In memory of King Cole, Aboriginal cricketer, who died on the 24th June 1868. Your Aboriginal dreamtime home. Wish you peace' 

I wonder if they eastenders as they pass through the old gate to spend a sunny afternoon in the park know anything of its history and the men that travelled from the other side of the world to play cricket.