SHAW AND SHREWSBURY WERE RUGBY PIONEERS

 

When the British Lions and their legion of fans tour Australia in 2025, they will do so under a badge that shows an emblem for each of the four home nations and bears the legend ‘Since 1888’.

That reflects a long history of pioneering tours, great players and heroic performances that stretches back to the Golden Age and…two Nottinghamshire cricketers!

The unexpected role of friends, team-mates and partners in various enterprises, Alfred Shaw, the ‘Emperor of Bowlers’, and Arthur Shrewsbury, the one Victorian era batter that could withstand comparison to WG, was revealed to the January meeting of the Nottingham Cricket Lovers Society (NCLS) by local historian and sports enthusiast, Neil Kendrick.

He explained that Shaw and Shrewsbury organised what they called a ‘football tour’ not from any great love of rugby – or even much knowledge of the game – but as a business venture informed by their experience of running cricket tours.

They certainly had no notion that they had set in train one of the great sporting franchises, particularly as, in Shaw’s own words, ‘...this enterprise also failed. It cost us about £300.’

Shaw did most of the tour planning whilst Shrewsbury was in Australia with a cricket team headed by himself and their partner James Lillywhite (who was not a partner to the rugby tour).  Arthur Shrewsbury then stayed on as the cricketers returned (this tour had also lost them money) to manage the incoming rugby team.

Neil Kendrick told NCLS members that the Rugby Union Committee were opposed to the tour initially because they feared that the players might be paid and thus infringe their amateur status. Even when apparently reassured there was, says Shaw ‘…an undercurrent of distrust in official circles of the amateurism of the players whose services I secured.’

In part because of this ‘cold sanction’ by the British rugby hierarchy, the 1888 tour played no international matches in either Australia or New Zealand. They did play 35 matches under rugby union rules, winning 27, and 18 of what was then ‘Victorian Rules’ (now Aussie Rules Football), winning seven of those despite not having played to those rules before.

With the poor financial return, the pair did not make any further tours, in either sporting code; Shaw states, ‘The men could not and did not make any money out of it. They had a pleasant trip and enlarged their minds by travel and experience.  That was all.’

It wasn’t, as Niel Kendrick pointed out, quite all – the party lost their captain Robert Seddon when he drowned on the Hunter River in New South Wales which must have made the trip less ‘pleasant’. Current tours acknowledge the pioneers and in 2013 touring skipper, Sam Warburton, placed a wreath on Seddon’s grave – in tribute to, as the British Lions website calls him, ‘the original captain of the British and Irish Lions’ (not that Seddon, Shaw or Shrewsbury would have recognised the name ‘British Lions’.

Seddon was replaced as skipper by Andrew Stoddart, who gained more fame as a cricketer and captained England in Test Matches – indeed he has the unique distinction captaining the national sides in three codes – cricket, rugby and (one the 1888 tour) Victorian rules.

In his presentation, Neil Kendrick explained that the 1888 tour party contained mainly English players with one Irish-born full-back, one Welshman, six Scots, one – AP Penketh – from the Isle of Man and even one American-born player, forward Jack Clowes.  The multi-national nature of the current badge is relevant even to that first tour and a link to the pioneering efforts of Alfred Shaw and Arthur Shrewsbury.

 

January 2024

Alfred Shaw’s book, Alfred Shaw, Cricketer – His Career and Reminiscences, can be read and borrowed by Notts CCC members from the Wynne-Thomas Library at Trent Bridge.

A new website for the Society was also announced at the November meeting and can be found at www.nottinghamcricketlovers.co.uk

Membership of NCLS is £15pa or entry on the night for £5 per session.  Full details of the 2023/24 programme from nottscricketlovers@outlook.com.