Spofforth, the Demon Bowler

In the 140 years since Test Match cricket began, there have been many bowlers who were greatly feared by the batsmen who faced them, but the original Demon Bowler; the first great bowler to appear on the international stage; was the Australian F. R. Spofforth.
Frederick Robert Spofforth was born at Balmain, near Sydney, in 1853, and was brought up in the Australian bush. He grew to be well over six feet tall, lean and strong, with a piercing eye and a great bristling moustache.
   In those days, cricket in Australia was played with underarm bowling, but when the young Spofforth watched the fast overarm bowling of  the touring Englishman George Tarrant he decided to copy him. A few years later he watched another touring Englishman, Alfred Shaw, with his changes of pace and flight, and resolved to use these methods too. He experimented with different grips of the ball whilst using the same bowling action. If he can be said to have had a single stock delivery, it would be a medium-paced off-cutter, placing two short-leg fieldsmen for close catches, but often bowling batsmen "through the gate" between bat and pad. Incidentally, this shows that intelligent pad-play was still in its infancy, since at the time a batsman could not be out LBW to a ball that pitched outside the off stump.  
   He was soon taking an impressive number of wickets, and although he was not selected for the first-ever Test Match between Australia and England, at Melbourne in March 1877, he did play in the second a fortnight later; his first victim, ironically enough, being his unwitting mentor Alfred Shaw. He was then duly selected to visit England with an Australian cricket team in 1878. 
   Oddly enough, no Tests were played on that tour, but Spofforth announced his powers, and the strength of Australian cricket, when in a single day at Lord's he took 10 wickets for 20, bowling the great W.G. Grace for a duck and twice dismissing M.C.C. for very low scores. Then, when an England team returned to Australia six months later, he scored his first international triumph, taking 6 for 48 and 7 for 62 at Melbourne in the only Test. In the first innings of this match he achieved the first-ever Test hat-trick.

  It was in 1882, at the Oval, that Spofforth attained immortality. In a very low-scoring match played on a wet pitch, he took 7 for 44 in the first innings and 7 for 44 in the second, dismissing England for only 77 and winning the match by 7 runs. It was this debacle that caused a journalist to lament "the death of English cricket", with the comment that "the body will be creamted and the ashes taken to Australia"; thereby unwittingly establishingthe symbol of the oldest rivalry in Test cricket. 
   Other notable performances followed, all at Sydney: 7 for 44 in 1883; 6 for 90 in the second Test in 1885, followed by 5 for 30 in the third. On the 1884 tour of England he took 207 wickets in all matches 

Spofforth played his last Test in the 1886/7 series against England; being succeeded by the likes of Turner, Ferris and Trumble as spearheads of the Australian attack. His final tally was 94 Test wickets in 18 matches for an average of 18.41. Not long afterward his final Test he moved to live in England.

    After settling in England, he played some matches for Derbyshire, where his family had originated, and also played club cricket for Hampstead, taking a great number of wickets at less than 10 runs apiece. 
 His final appearance in first class cricket was at the Scarborough Festival in 1896, finishing with 8 wickets for 74 for M.C.C. against Yorkshire: a Demon to the very last.
   Unlike many sportsmen, he had a successful career after retirement. He became director of a tea importing company, and when he died in 1926 he left the very substantial sum of £164,000. He was clearly as effective as a businessman as he had been as a Demon Bowler.