Empire Cricket Booklet

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KEITH BOOTH

overbearing and condescending attitude of the 'burly and surly' captain did nothing to commend itself to the Australians, but also among the tourists, as the manager and senior players, Lohmann especially, found themselves at odds with Grace over tactics on the field it and behaviour off it. Nevertheless, for the second occasion, he took eight wickets at Sydney and still has the best and second-best Test figures on the ground. He was hero-worshipped on two continents and within a few years would enjoy similar status on a third. The roots of most contemporary professional cricket ers were firmly in the working classes of the rigid social structure of the Victorian age. They tended to specialise in bowling while their playing colleagues in

the hagiographic 'Surrey poet', he was Lohmann, Our Pride and Glory. He took five wickets or more in an innings in 60 per cent of his 293 first-class matches and topped 200 wickets in three consecutive seasons, the first player to do so. A pioneer of the art of medium pace bowling, brilliant fielder and dashing batsman, he was the main force behind Surrey's domination of county cricket in the late nineteenth century, the height of the Victorian era. From 1886 to 1896, except for those occasions when illness prevented his playing, he was an automatic choice for England during one of the few periods in cricket history when the mother country dominated the colonial upstarts from Australia. He took twelve

George Lohmann

the separate amateurs' dressing room, many of them from the privileged background of public schools and universities, were batsmen who regarded bowling and fielding as mundane tasks to be undertaken by their social inferiors. Lohmann, from a respectable middle-class background, was an exception to this general pattern and could conceivably have chosen the amateur route. His father was a member of the London Stock Exchange and the young George, privately educated, had been a clerk there before becoming a

wickets at The Oval in only his third Test, as England won the series 3-0, two of them by large margins. Lohmann toured Australia on three occasions, in 1886/87, 1887/88 and 1891/92. He was part of a winning team on the first two, but on the last occasion, under the management of Lord Sheffield and captaincy of W. G. Grace, the English succumbed to unexpected defeats in Melbourne and Sydney. It was a tour characterised by acrimony, not only between hosts and guests as the