Empire Cricket Booklet

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GEORGE LOHMANN

Lohmann lived at a time when standards of health and life expectancy in both urban and rural areas were much lower than they have subsequently become. He was a smoker when the medical profession was unaware of the dangers - indeed, it encouraged the habit as one method of clearing the lungs. That could not have helped, neither could the polluted London atmosphere. It is estimated that in the 1890s, 200 tons of soot per day were pumped into the air.3 The industrial revolution had brought with it slum dwellings, which were overcrowded and poorly ventilated. Standards of hygiene in Melbourne were also low, and the city was called 'marvellous Smellbourne' by the locals 'on account of the variety and strength of the odour emitted from badly-drained streets and backyards'. 4 There is no doubt that by any reasonable standard, Lohmann was overworked as a bowler. This would have had no direct effect on his incipient tuberculosis, except perhaps to cause exhaustion and thereby lower his resistance to any air-borne disease. At the end of the 1892 season, it would never have occurred to him or any one else that he had played his last first-class cricket for two and a half years. The years between the ages of 27 and 30 are when fast and medium pace bowlers would expect to reach their peak. But this assumes a training regime which intersperses periods of rest in between periods of intense physical activity. Twenty-first century international bowlers are cotton-wool wrapped, largely protected from the rigours of county cricket between Test matches and limited-over internationals and can expect to bowl perhaps 400 to 500 overs a year. In 2007, only five bowlers bowled over 500 first-class overs - and four of those were spinners. A hundred years ago and more, the scene could scarcely have been more different. Occasionally, the boot was on the other foot. Power and influence in cricket lay not with corporate bodies like the England and Wales Cricket Board, but affluent and strong personalities like W. G. Grace, Lord Harris and Lord Hawke, the latter having no inhibitions about forbidding George Hirst and Wilfred Rhodes from playing international cricket to preserve their freshness for their native Yorkshire.

full-time professional cricketer. He was an articulate and literate man with financial acumen who reputedly gave sound advice to fellow professionals from less advantaged backgrounds. He was also aware of his commercial worth and drove a hard bargain to ensure that he was appropriately rewarded. He was among the best-paid professionals and the first to be awarded a 'star' contract which guaranteed him a minimum salary unrelated to performance. However, his earnings were negligible compared with those of the 'amateur' W. G. Grace, who commanded £3 000 for the 1891/92 tour of Australia, while the professionals received about one-tenth of that amount. In 18%, his last year of Test cricket, he was the ring leader of a group of professionals who challenged the cricketing establishment, the hypocrisy of the gentlemen-players divide and the rate of £10 per match, derisory in the context of what the 'amateurs', both English and Australian, were taking from the game. That particular battle was lost, but the war was eventually won: professionalism in cricket and other sports became respectable. Lohmann had led the way. It was four years before that, however, that his health began to decline. Nowadays, reductions in atmospheric pollution, almost immeasurable im provements in hygiene, antibiotics and anti-microbial medicines have reduced exposure to the killer diseases of the nineteenth century, of which pulmonary tuber culosis, or 'consumption' as it was known at the time, was among the greatest. The only known palliative was fresh air, but in the majority of cases it was only partial and served merely to delay the inevitable by a few years. In the nineteenth century, the disease was incurable and responsible at various times for between eight and fifteen per cent of all deaths. By the late twentieth century, that figure had fallen to 0.1 per cent. 2 It was the cancer or HIV/AIDS of its day and sufferers were frequently sidelined and stigmatised by society. Although almost eradicated in the West, it still accounts for three million lives per annum in developing countries. Ye gentlemen of England: your honour do not stain, But call your pay expenses; and gentlemen remain.