The Ashes
The Ashes is a Test cricket series played biennially between England and Australia. The term originated in a satirical obituary published in a British newspaper, The Sporting Times, immediately after Australia's 1882 victory at The Oval, its first Test win on English soil. The obituary stated that English cricket had died, and that "the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia". The mythical ashes immediately became associated with the 1882–83 series played in Australia, before which the English captain the Hon. Ivo Bligh had vowed to "regain those ashes". The English media therefore dubbed the tour the Quest to regain the Ashes.
After England won two of the three Tests on the tour, a small urn was presented to Bligh at Melbourne. The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of a wooden cricket bail. It is not clear whether that "tiny silver urn" is the same as the small terracotta urn given to Marylebone Cricket Club by Bligh's widow after his death in 1927.
The Ashes urn has never been the official trophy of the series, having been a personal gift to Bligh, but replicas of the urn have often been held aloft by the winning team as a symbol of their victory. Since the 1998–99 Ashes series, the Ashes Trophy, a Waterford Crystal trophy modelled on the Ashes urn, has been presented to the winners of the series. Irrespective of which side holds the trophy, the original urn remains in the MCC Museum at Lord's. It has been taken to Australia twice to be put on touring display, as part of the Australian Bicentenary celebrations in 1988 and to accompany the Ashes series in 2006–07.
Ashes series usually comprise five Tests, hosted in turn by England and Australia approximately every two years. The Ashes are regarded as being held by the team that most recently won the series. If the series is drawn, the team that currently holds the Ashes "retains" the trophy.
1882 origins
The first Test match between England and Australia was played at Melbourne, Australia, in 1877, though the Ashes legend started later, after the ninth Test, played in 1882. On their tour of England that year the Australians played just one Test, at The Oval in London. It was a low-scoring affair on a difficult wicket. Australia made a mere 63 runs in their first innings, and England, led by A. N. Hornby, took a 38-run lead with a total of 101. In their second innings, Australia, boosted by a spectacular 55 runs off 60 deliveries hit by Hugh Massie, managed 122, which left England only 85 runs to win. The Australians were greatly demoralised by the manner of their second-innings collapse, but fast bowler Fred Spofforth, spurred on by the gamesmanship of his opponents, in particular W. G. Grace, refused to give in. "This thing can be done," he declared. Spofforth went on to devastate the English batting, taking his final four wickets for only two runs to leave England just eight runs short of victory.When Ted Peate, England's last batsman, came to the crease, his side needed just ten runs to win, but Peate managed only two before he was bowled by Harry Boyle. An astonished Oval crowd fell silent, struggling to believe that England could possibly have lost on home soil. When it finally sank in, the crowd swarmed onto the field, cheering loudly and chairing Boyle and Spofforth to the pavilion.
When Peate returned to the pavilion he was reprimanded by his captain for not allowing his partner, Charles Studd, to get the runs. Peate humorously replied, "I had no confidence in Mr Studd, sir, so thought I had better do my best."
The momentous defeat was widely recorded in the British press, which praised the Australians for their plentiful "pluck" and berated the Englishmen for their lack thereof. A celebrated poem appeared in Punch on Saturday, 9 September. The first verse, quoted most frequently, reads:
Well done, Cornstalks! Whipt us
Fair and square,
Was it luck that tript us?
Was it scare?
Kangaroo Land's 'Demon', or our own
Want of 'devil', coolness, nerve, backbone?
On 31 August, in the magazine edited by Charles Alcock, Cricket: A Weekly Record of The Game, there appeared a mock obituary:
On 2 September a more celebrated mock obituary, written by Reginald Shirley Brooks, appeared in The Sporting Times. It read:
The Hon. Ivo Bligh promised that on the 1882–83 tour of Australia, he would, as England's captain, "recover those Ashes". He spoke of them several times over the course of the tour, and the Australian media quickly caught on. The three-match series resulted in a two-one win to England, notwithstanding a fourth match, won by the Australians, whose status remains the subject of ardent dispute.
In the 20 years following Bligh's campaign the term "the Ashes" largely disappeared from public use. There is no indication that this was the accepted name for the series, at least not in England. The term became popular again in Australia first, when George Giffen, in his memoirs, used the title as if it were well known.
The true and global revitalisation of interest in the concept dates from 1903, when Sir Pelham Warner took a team to Australia with the promise that he would regain "the Ashes". As had been the case on Bligh's tour 20 years before, the Australian media latched fervently onto the term and, this time, it stuck. Having fulfilled his promise, Warner published a book entitled How We Recovered the Ashes. Although the origins of the term are not referred to in the text, the title served to revive public interest in the legend. The first mention of "the Ashes" in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack occurs in 1905, while Wisdens first account of the legend is in its 1922 edition.
Urn
It took many years before the contest between England and Australia were consistently called "the Ashes", and so there was no concept of either a trophy or a physical representation of the ashes. As late as 1925, the following verse appeared in The Cricketers Annual:
So here's to Chapman, Hendren and Hobbs,
Gilligan, Woolley and Hearne
May they bring back to the Motherland,
The ashes which have no urn!
Nevertheless, several attempts had been made to embody the Ashes in a physical memorial. Examples include one presented to Warner in 1904, another to Australian captain M. A. Noble in 1909, and another to Australian captain W. M. Woodfull in 1934.
The oldest, and the one to enjoy enduring fame, was the one presented to Bligh, later Lord Darnley, during the 1882–83 tour. The precise nature of the origin of this urn remains a matter of dispute. Based on a statement by Bligh in 1894, it was believed that a group of Victorian ladies, including Bligh's fiancée Florence Morphy, made the presentation after the victory in the Third Test in 1883. More recent researchers, in particular Ronald Willis and Joy Munns have studied the tour in detail and concluded that the presentation was made after a private cricket match played over Christmas 1882 when the English team were guests of Sir William Clarke, on his estate "Rupertswood", at Sunbury, Victoria. This was before the matches had started. The prime evidence for this theory was provided by a descendant of Clarke.
In August 1926 Ivo Bligh displayed the Ashes urn at the Morning Post Decorative Art Exhibition held in the Central Hall, Westminster. Darnley made the following statement about how he was given the urn:
A more detailed account of how the Ashes were given to the Hon. Ivo Bligh was outlined by his widow, the Countess of Darnley, in 1930 when speaking at a cricket luncheon. Her speech was reported by The Times as follows:
There is another statement which is not totally clear made by Lord Darnley in 1921 about the timing of the presentation of the urn. He was interviewed in his Cobham Hall seat by Montague Grover and the report of this interview was as follows:
He made a similar statement in 1926. The report of this statement in the Brisbane Courier was as follows:
The contents of the urn are also problematic; they were variously reported to be the remains of a stump, bail or a ball leather casing, but in 1998 Lord Darnley's 82-year-old daughter-in-law suggested they were the remains of her mother-in-law's veil, creating added confusion to the matter. However, during the tour of Australia in 2006–07, the MCC official accompanying the urn said the veil myth had been discounted, and it was now "95% certain" that the urn contains the ashes of a cricket bail. Speaking on Channel Nine TV on 25 November 2006, he said x-rays of the urn showed the pedestal and handles were cracked, and repair work had to be carried out. The urn is made of terracotta and is about tall and may originally have been a perfume jar.
A label containing a six-line verse is pasted on the urn. This is the fourth verse of a song-lyric published in the Melbourne Punch on 1 February 1883:
When Ivo goes back with the urn, the urn;
Studds, Steel, Read and Tylecote return, return;
The welkin will ring loud,
The great crowd will feel proud,
Seeing Barlow and Bates with the urn, the urn;
And the rest coming home with the urn.
In February 1883, just before the disputed Fourth Test, a velvet bag made by Mrs Ann Fletcher, the daughter of Captain Joseph Hines Clarke and Marion Wright, both of Dublin, was given to Bligh to contain the urn. During Darnley's lifetime there was little public knowledge of the urn, and no record of a published photograph exists before 1921. The Illustrated London News published this photo in January 1921. When Darnley died in 1927 his widow presented the urn to the Marylebone Cricket Club and that was the key event in establishing the urn as the physical embodiment of the legendary ashes. MCC first displayed the urn in the Long Room and since 1953 in the MCC Cricket Museum at Lord's. MCC's wish for it to be seen by as wide a range of cricket enthusiasts as possible has led to its being mistaken for an official trophy. It is in fact a private memento, and for this reason it is never awarded to either England or Australia, but is kept permanently in the MCC Cricket Museum where it can be seen together with the specially made red and gold velvet bag with the scorecard of the 1882 match.
Because the urn itself is so delicate, it has been allowed to travel to Australia on only three occasions. The first occasion was in 1988 for a museum tour as part of the Australian Bicentenary celebrations; the second was for the 2006–07 Ashes series. The urn arrived on 17 October 2006, going on display at the Museum of Sydney. It then toured other Australian states, with the final appearance at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery on 21 January 2007.
Between December 2019 and February 2020, the Ashes Urn was on display at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia as part of the .
In the 1990s, given Australia's long dominance of the Ashes and the popular acceptance of the Darnley urn as "the Ashes", the idea was mooted that the victorious team should be awarded the urn as a trophy and allowed to retain it until the next series. As its condition is fragile and it is a prized exhibit at Lord's Cricket Museum, the MCC would not agree. Furthermore, in 2002, Bligh's great-great-grandson Lord Clifton, then-heir apparent to the earldom of Darnley, argued that the Ashes urn should not be returned to Australia because it belonged to his family and was given to the MCC only for safe keeping.
As a compromise, the MCC commissioned a larger replica of the urn in Waterford Crystal, known as the Ashes Trophy, to award to the winning team of each series starting with the 1998–99 Ashes. This did little to diminish the status of the Darnley urn as the most celebrated icon in cricket, the symbol of this historic and keenly-fought contest.