A Corner of a Foreign Field

GH sees some history recalled - and made

But smile gallant fellows, not few are the friends

Who would soften the place of his pillow

It may be our children will garland his grave

’Ere you have gone over the billow.

At this point, Ian Friend paused in his reading, and reflected that this was exactly what we were doing: garlanding the grave of the only Australian cricketer to die on tour, King Cole (Bripumyarrumin), a member of that unique assemblage, the 1868 indigenous team led by Friend’s great-great grandfather Charles Lawrence.

That’s King Cole in the upper left, shaping up as if to box; Lawrence at the top

The garlands we brought were tokens of Johnny Mullagh (Unarammin): water, soil and leaves, plus soil and leaves from his late life home; his watch; one of the team’s distinctive bat and boomerang badges. The words, read in the presence of Aunty Fiona Clarke, a descendant of their teammate Johnny Cuzens (Yellenach), were composed by Lawrence, perhaps for graveside recitation, although who knows? The whole interlude is a bit of a mystery, even to the well-informed Josie Sangster and Marcus Curnow from the Harrow Discovery Centre, organisers of the trip.

King Cole played the first game on that trip at The Oval, where his 14 was second top score behind Mullagh’s 33; he also bowled nine wicketless overs for 16. He was second top score with 18 against the Kent Gentleman at Gravesend, where he became the first Australian to get the better of a Boycott (a Captain Boycott, otherwise unknown to fame). But a week after the inaugural Australian match at Lord’s, whose 157th anniversary actually fell during the World Test Championship, he fell ill at Stortford, and was admitted to historic Guy’s Hospital - his cause of death on 24 June 1868 was reported as ‘acute pneumonia’ or ‘inflammation of the lungs’ though most sources give tuberculosis as the underlying cause. News did not reach the cricketers’ Western District home for another three months. ‘Poor King Cole has ceased to be a merry old soul - and cricketer,’ reported one newspaper lightly.

Somehow, I had always imagined the setting to be an unmarked plot in one of those huge storied London necropolises. In fact, the whole Victoria Park Cemetery is unmarked, forming part of Meath Gardens, a pretty corner of London’s Bethnal Green which took the area over in 1894 .

Victorian cemeteries were not public amenities but private sector Ponzi schemes.

All Victorian commercial cemeteries were based on the unsound economic premise of selling a finite resource (grave spaces) whilst accepting indefinite responsibility for the upkeep of the cemetery. In the short-term cemeteries did a brisk business selling grave plots in perpetuity but once space began to run short, sales declined precipitously and income no longer covered the costs of running the business. In response cemetery companies would ruthlessly cut costs, no longer maintaining their burial grounds and allowing them to become run down and overgrown but even so most of them eventually went bust. The Victoria Park Cemetery Company compounded the difficulties caused by a flawed business model by undercutting the prices of their rivals to generate sales; they went bankrupt just 8 years after the cemetery opened.

Thus King Cole’s interment, one suspects, in what was essentially a pauper’s graveyard - funerals had probably not been part of Lawrence’s budget. But he has ended up doing better than most, thanks to the commemorative plaque left by the Aboriginal XI that toured England under John McGuire’s captaincy as part of 1988’s bicentenary, who also planted a eucalyptus - its successor tree is in rude health, leading Josie to try calculating its girth.

Ian eventually carried on reading his ancestor’s doggerel, on which I doubt Pat Cummins could improve were he called on to deal with an intercession of ‘the bloody uprooter’ in his ranks.

How did a team go on in these circumstances? Incredibly, it seems, they were actually playing in Hastings, without Lawrence, the day King Cole died. Two days later they were in the Yorkshire market town of Halifax, where Mullagh and Lawrence took eighteen wickets between them. The schedule did not leave much time for grief: on a fixture list to scandalise Paul Marsh, the team played ninety days of a total one hundred and twenty-six.

You could not accuse Lawrence of requiring something of his team he was not prepared for himself. From Surrey, he had transplanted himself in Australia after visiting as part of HH Stephenson’s team of 1861-62, eventually bringing out his wife Anne and becoming a hotelier at Manly. But in October 1866, he had lost his wife and five-week old infant from the after-effects of childbirth; two months later he sold the licence, stock and furniture of his Pier Hotel due to what the Sydney Morning Herald reported as his ‘severe domestic affliction’. It was at this point he encountered the indigenous cricketers, who had come to Sydney after a famous Boxing Day match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. He turned talk of a tour of England into a reality, even designing their garish uniform of white flannel trousers and linen collars, red shirts and blue sashes, and encouraging them to practice their tribal skills of boomerang and spear throwing “which pleased them very much and they soon became proficient and willing to do anything that I wanted them to learn”.

That’s KC on the left, foot jauntily propped on the chair

Ian still has the bible from which Lawrence read to his charges. Perhaps he had recourse to the consolations of Ecclesiastes 3:1-2a: ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die…’

There were just a handful of us in the park today, but it was honestly quite extraordinary to walk beneath the ancient gothic arch that is just about the cemetery’s last remaining trace…

….and join descendants of the dramatis personae of the 1868 tour. Aunty Fiona blessed the tree with the gathered garlands….

….and stood arm-in-arm with Ian as we contemplated the ‘hero intrepid and bold’ who had been ‘run out for naught in the game of his life’. A moment to bring a tear to the eye, even of Cricket Et Al.

The combined ‘cricket business’ and ‘sorry business’ trip continues tomorrow at the Oval, and the day after at Brunel’s SS Great Britain - that jumbo jet of its age, which carried the team to and fro. Next Sunday will find them at Trent Bridge during the Nottinghamshire v Yorkshire match promoting the new Ten Bag Press edition of that hardy perennial Cricket Walkabout. So smile gallant fellows…..