London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
Daily word time.
Actually, make that daily words time.
We’ve got two today.
Ashes.
And metonym.
They make a very good pair.
Ashes first.
Ashes are what remain when something has been burned.
The word goes all the way back to the Old English æsce.
A very old word for what’s left after the fire has done its work.
Dust.
Cinders.
The remains.
Ashes to ashes.
Dust to dust.
It’s a word of death.
A word of mourning.
A word of finality.
Except in this story, the ashes became the beginning.
And then our second word.
Metonym.
A metonym is a word or object used to represent something closely associated with it.
“The Crown” means the monarchy.
“Downing Street” means the Prime Minister or the government.
“Fleet Street” means the British press.
“The City” means London’s financial world.
And “the Ashes” means the whole titanic cricketing rivalry between England and Australia.
Two teams.
Two countries.
Hundreds of players.
Hundreds of matches.
Triumphs. Humiliations. Heroes. Villains. Controversies. Collapses.
A century and a half of sporting history.
All carried by two little words.
The Ashes.
That’s metonymy doing some extremely heavy lifting.
And it all began in London.
At the Oval.
On August 29th, 1882.
The day English cricket died.
Now, before we lower the coffin into the ground, a quick linguistic single through the covers.
Why is cricket called cricket?
Nobody knows for certain.
The name of the game is probably not connected to the chirping insect.
That “cricket” comes from a word imitating the creature’s creaking, rattling sound.
The game’s name appears in English in the late sixteenth century.
It may come from the Old French criquet, meaning a goalpost or stick.
Behind that may be the Middle Dutch or Flemish cricke, a stick or staff.
A distant cousin, perhaps, of “crutch” and “crook”.
So cricket may simply mean the game played with a stick.
Fair enough.
Though anybody who has tried to understand the rules might reasonably assume the word came from an ancient expression meaning, “Nobody has the faintest idea what’s going on.”
But on August 29th, 1882, everybody at the Oval knew what was going on.
England was losing.
To Australia.
At home.
Unthinkable.
The match had begun the previous day.
The Oval was already one of London’s great sporting stages.
Set down in Kennington.
South London.
A great green arena enclosed by the growing Victorian city.
Terraces. Railway lines. Church towers. Chimneys. Gas holders.
London pressing in on every side.
Australia batted first.
They were dismissed for 63.
Sixty-three.
Not much of a score.
England replied with 101.
Advantage England.
Australia then made 122 in their second innings.
That left England needing just 85 runs to win.
Eighty-five.
The match was theirs.
Or so everybody thought.
England were the overwhelming favourites.
Their batsmen had the better records.
Their bowlers had the better records.
They were playing at home.
They had W. G. Grace.
The great W. G.
The most famous cricketer in the world.
The magnificent beard.
The commanding presence.
The man who seemed almost to own English cricket.
Australia, though, had Fred Spofforth.
Fred “The Demon” Spofforth.
Splendid name.
You hear that name coming towards you, you put your pads on very carefully.
Spofforth was tall, thin, fast and ferocious.
A black moustache.
A piercing stare.
He bowled as though the batsman had personally insulted him.
And in this match, he was angry.
Very angry.
During Australia’s second innings, the Australian batsman Sammy Jones played the ball, then wandered out of his crease to pat down the pitch.
He assumed the ball was dead.
W. G. Grace didn’t.
Grace picked it up and removed the bails.
Jones was out.
Perfectly legal.
But the Australians thought it was sharp practice.
Not cricket.
There’s an expression for you.
“Not cricket.”
Meaning unfair.
Unsporting.
Not how the game should be played.
Spofforth was enraged.
He’s said to have gone into the Australian dressing room and declared:
“This thing can be done.”
In other words, England could be beaten.
And Fred Spofforth intended to do it.
England began their pursuit of 85 runs at 3.45 in the afternoon.
The crowd settled in to watch the formality.
A small target.
An easy victory.
W. G. Grace and the England captain, A. N. Hornby, went out to bat.
Spofforth bowled Hornby.
Then he bowled Richard Barlow first ball.
Two wickets.
But England recovered.
Grace and George Ulyett took the score to 51.
Fifty-one.
Only 34 more needed.
Seven wickets still standing.
England had it.
Surely.
And then Ulyett was caught.
Grace followed.
The pressure began to build.
The crowd went quiet.
Runs dried up.
Over after over passed without a run being scored.
Twelve successive maiden overs.
Twelve.
The Australian bowlers tightened their grip.
The England batsmen became afraid to play.
Every ball mattered.
Every run mattered.
Every appeal sent a tremor through the ground.
News of what was happening spread through London.
More people came rushing towards the Oval.
The crowd grew.
The tension thickened.
England reached 66.
Only 19 needed.
Five wickets left.
Still England’s match.
Then another wicket fell.
And another.
The Demon was at work.
Seventy-five.
Only ten runs needed.
But England were running out of batsmen.
Dick Barlow was gone.
Hornby was gone.
Grace was gone.
Ulyett was gone.
Lyttelton was gone.
Steel was gone.
Read was gone.
Lucas was gone.
Barnes was gone.
The last man came in.
Ted Peate.
At the other end was Charles Studd.
England needed ten.
Peate struck the ball for two.
Eight needed.
Then Harry Boyle bowled again.
Peate swung.
Missed.
The ball hit the wicket.
England all out for 77.
Australia had won by seven runs.
For a moment, silence.
London stunned.
Then the crowd poured onto the field.
They surrounded the Australian players.
Congratulated them.
Cheered them.
Australia had done the impossible.
They had defeated England on English soil.
And Fred “The Demon” Spofforth had taken fourteen wickets in the match.
Fourteen.
English cricket had suffered a national humiliation.
The newspapers let them have it.
And a few days later, on September 2nd, The Sporting Times, a London newspaper, published one of the greatest jokes in the history of sport.
A mock obituary.
“In Affectionate Remembrance
of
ENGLISH CRICKET,
which died at the Oval
on
29 August 1882,
Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing
friends and acquaintances.
R.I.P.
N.B. The body will be cremated and the
ashes taken to Australia.”
There it is.
The birth certificate.
Or perhaps we should say the death certificate.
English cricket was dead.
The body would be cremated.
The ashes would be taken to Australia.
At this point, the ashes were imaginary.
A joke.
A wonderfully cheeky piece of London journalism.
There was no urn.
There were no actual ashes.
Just the supposedly cremated remains of dead English cricket.
Then England prepared to send a team to Australia.
Its captain was the wonderfully named Ivo Bligh.
Bligh promised to recover “those ashes”.
And suddenly the newspaper joke became a quest.
England wasn’t merely going to Australia to play cricket.
England was going to recover its honour.
Recover its supremacy.
Recover the Ashes.
Bligh’s team won the series.
And during the tour, a group of Australian women presented him with a tiny terracotta urn.
Only about eleven centimetres high.
Small enough to hold in one hand.
Inside it were some ashes.
Probably the remains of a burnt cricket bail.
Probably.
Other candidates have been suggested.
Part of a ball covering.
Even a lady’s veil.
Nobody knows for certain.
Which is just as it should be.
Every great relic needs a little mystery.
Ivo Bligh later married Florence Morphy, one of the women associated with the presentation.
So he went to Australia to recover the Ashes and came home with a wife into the bargain.
That’s what you call a successful tour.
The urn eventually found its way to Lord’s.
And there it remains.
Which brings us back to our second word.
Metonym.
The little urn isn’t the whole history of England against Australia.
It stands for that history.
And, strictly speaking, it isn’t even the trophy the teams now lift.
It’s far too old, too small and too fragile to be carted backwards and forwards around the world.
The original urn normally stays safely at Lord’s.
The modern teams compete for a much larger crystal trophy modelled on it.
But nobody says they’re playing for the crystal trophy.
They’re playing for the Ashes.
That tiny urn is the metonym.
The little object that carries the enormous story.
But let’s bring it home.
Because the Ashes were born in London.
Not in Melbourne.
Not in Sydney.
Not at Lord’s.
At the Oval.
And not simply in the cricket ground.
They were born twice.
First, in the match itself.
Then, a few days later, in the offices of a London newspaper.
South London supplied the sporting drama.
Fleet Street supplied the immortal joke.
And between them they created one of the world’s great sporting rivalries.
There’s something else wonderfully London about it.
England lost.
The country was humiliated.
And what did London do?
It made a joke.
A mock funeral.
A comic death notice.
English cricket was dead.
Cremate the body.
Send the ashes to Australia.
And the joke proved more durable than any serious proclamation could ever have been.
The score 77 is remembered.
The seven-run defeat is remembered.
Fred Spofforth is remembered.
Ivo Bligh is remembered.
The tiny urn is one of the most famous objects in sport.
And every few years, millions of people become passionately exercised about the whereabouts of some ashes that never really existed.
That’s the beauty of it.
The fiction became a tradition.
The joke became an institution.
The imaginary ashes became real ashes.
And two words became a metonym for one of the fiercest contests in sport.
So, August 29th, 1882.
The Oval.
England needs 85.
Australia has a Demon.
The Demon takes fourteen wickets.
England collapses.
Australia wins by seven runs.
English cricket dies.
The body is cremated.
The ashes are taken to Australia.
Or so The Sporting Times tells its readers.
Ashes.
Metonym.
Two words.
One tiny urn.
And a sporting rivalry born out of a London defeat and a London joke.
You’ve been listening to the London Walks podcast.
From the Oval, from Kennington, from the day English cricket died and the Ashes were born, goodbye.
Well not quite goodbye. And not quite Kennington. Rather, Padua, in Italy. And London Calling has just reached a milestone. Half a million listens. Ok, it’s only a few hundred listens a day because our episode total is like a world record innings in cricket, well into four figures. But hey we’ll take it. And it’s going to be easy for us to remember this one. Remember the date we passed the half million listens milestone. August 28th.
We won’t forget it because our oldest son is getting married here in just a few hours.
See you tomorrow.