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Early tour of sideshows and insults

By Matthew Beard

28 August 2001 - The first Aboriginal team to play in England arrived in 1868, 10 years before the first white team to reach British shores.

They were led by the English entrepreneur Charles Lawrence, a former Surrey cricketer, who gathered his side from the sheep shearing stations of Victoria.

The team were smuggled out of the country against the Government's wishes and boarded the Parramatta ship for the four-month voyage.

On their arrival they attracted crowds of up to 10,000 and developed a remarkable record for stamina, playing 47 matches between May and October and winning 14 of them.

The tour was intended as a money-making venture and the players, who were all stripped of their Aboriginal names and given degrading nicknames, were required to provide sideshows to the cricket matches including boomerang and spear throwing and high-jump. The Aboriginal side was narrowly beaten in a cricket ball throwing competition by a 20-year-old W G Grace, who threw 118 yards.

One player named "Dick-a-Dick" impressed large crowds by sprinting 100 yards in under 14 seconds – backwards.

On their tour of the country the team of 1868 encountered considerable racial prejudice. They were barred from a post-match function in York – an incident which prompted diplomatic difficulties and a subsequent apology. During a visit to Nottingham the players went after a match to a bathhouse where they were mistaken for miners and subjected to attempts to scrub their skin white.

In midsummer one of the players, King Cole, died in Guy's hospital of tuberculosis amid false reports in the English press that he had been snubbed in death by his team-mates.

The current touring team will conduct a memorial service attended by the England captain Nasser Hussain at King Cole's grave in Tower Hamlets next week.

This article appeared in The Independent

related links :

• Australians broaden the game's horizons
  22 July, 2003 - cricInfo.com (UK) - The Australian cricketers should have been playing the final day of their Test match with Bangladesh today, but instead they spent the day eating buffalo and fishing with Aborigines on the remote Tiwi Islands north of Darwin.
• The Australians who toured England - nine years before the first Test match.
• Wake up Australia, racism is a problem
  January 20, 2003 - The Guardian (UK) - The Darren Lehmann case has exposed a double standard in the Australian cricket community. Normally, moments of the highest pressure in sport are held to reveal character. Steve Waugh’s toughness and Shane Warne’s genius are revealed precisely in the heat of the moment.
• Aborigines cast spell over Norwich
  January 1, 2003 - Norwich Evening News - Probably the most remarkable team ever to appear in the city made their visit in the summer of 1868. That was when the touring Australian Aborigines took on club side Carrow, a match recalled in a newly-published book by Australia's former Test off-spinner, now journalist, Ashley Mallett.
• Forgotten Aborigine team who changed cricket forever
  Friday March 8, 2002 - Guardian (UK) - They were cricket's forgotten heroes - a team of Aborigines who came to England in 1868 viewed as little more than a joke, and ended up changing the face of cricket forever. Now a previously unseen archive of photographs, scorebooks and other memorabilia chronicling the first - and last - tour by native Australians has surfaced after languishing in an attic for more than 80 years.
• Aboriginal side returns to blaze a trail
  August 20, 2001 - It's taken more than 130 years, but the second tour of England by an Aboriginal cricket side has finally begun.
• Early tour of sideshows and insults
  August 28, 2001 - The first Aboriginal team to play in England arrived in 1868, 10 years before the first white team to reach British shores.

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