The cricketer who beat the Aussies and urned a bride

As the 2025-26 Ashes begins in Perth, LEO MCKINSTRY on the curious origins of one of the world’s great sporting contests and why cricket is baked into our Anglo-Australian cultural heritage... despite the odd bust-up

- LEO MCKINSTRY

THE tension in the packed crowd of 20,000 people at the Oval cricket ground that afternoon in August 1882 was almost unbearable. As England inched with agonising slowness towards the modest target set by Australia, the pressure became too much for some spectators.

One man reportedly died of a heart attack, while another chewed right through the handle of his umbrella.

The strain also told on the England batsmen, who kept losing wickets at regular intervals, most of them to Frederick Spofforth, the Australian bowler known as “The Demon” for his unrelenting hostility. “Spofforth was no bowler, he was a hypnotist,” said England player Billy Barnes. Dismissed for 77, the hosts fell short by just seven runs.

As the cricket writer Tim Wigmore recounts in his monumental new history of Test cricket, this episode turned out to be a moment of destiny for the sport. England and Australia had been playing Test matches since March 1877, but the Oval humiliation was the national side's first home defeat by any visiting team from Down Under. The result sent a shockwave through the sports-loving British public.

Satirising this mood of despair, a boozy, irreverent journalist called Reginald Shirley Brooks, who worked on The Sporting Times, wrote a mock obituary for the game which read: “In affectionate remembrance of English cricket which died at the Oval on August 29, 1882. Deeply lamented by a large circle of friends and acquaintances. RIP.

"NB: The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.”

Brooks' choice of words showed that, as well as making fun of the hysteria over England's defeat, he also wanted to highlight a political message about cremation, which in 1882 was still illegal in Britain. Both Brooks and his father were powerful campaigners for the practice though neither of them lived to see its legalisation in 1902.

But the joke about the death of English cricket had a far more immediate impact.