Tour of Australia 1920-21                    Captain :  Johnny Douglas            

23rd England Test tour

 (September 1920 - March 1921)

Sixteenth Test playing tour of Australia by England

  (previous tour 1911-12)

M.C.C. declined an invitation to tour Australia in 1919-20.

The team spent a week in quarantine following a death from typhoid fever in Colombo and consequently one match against Western Australia had to be cancelled.  In addition the tour of Tasmania was cancelled on 16 January because of a shipping strike.

The Test series was a disaster.  England lost every match in the series, the first time that a 5-0 result had ever happened.  Australia also won the first three Tests of the 1921 series giving them a record eight Test victories in a row over England. Partly the explanation may be laid at the unimaginative captaincy of Johnny Douglas.

R.H.Spooner was offered the captaincy originally but, having suffered a knee injury when hunting, he did not consider himself fit enough to accept. He was replaced in the team by spin bowler Rockley Wilson, who was one of the more unexpected choices of the selectors although his skill in the final Test impressed the Australians. He and Fender wrote newspaper columns, including controversial comments about crowd behaviour and umpiring standards, in order to offset their expenses as amateurs.

All England tours

Previous Test tour

South Africa 1913-14

Next Test tour

South Africa 1922-23

Next tour of Australia

1924-25

Members of the Test tour party (16)

Opening batsmen:Jack Hobbs, Wilfred Rhodes, Jack Russell

Middle-order batsmen Harry Makepeace, Patsy Hendren, Jack Hearne, Frank Woolley, Percy Fender

Wicket-keepers: Herbert Strudwick, Arthur Dolphin

All-rounder:  Johnny Douglas

Slow bowlers: Cecil Parkin, Rockley Wilson

Fast bowlers: Bill Hitch, Harry Howell, Abram Waddington

County representation:

Ex  -  Essex (2)

Kt  -  Kent (1)

La - Lancashire (2)

Mx - Middlesex (2)

Sy - Surrey (4)

Wk - Warwickshire (1)

Y - Yorkshire (4)

Average age of  team at time of first Test match

(17 December 1920)

34  yrs  5 months.

Key to type:

RHB Right-handed bat

RM  Right arm medium-paced bowler

RFM  Right-arm fast medium

OB   Off-break

SRA  Slow right-arm bowler

WK  Wicket-keeper

Test Appearances made before the tour

Rhodes 47,  Hobbs 28,  Woolley 22,  Hearne 13,  Douglas 11,  Strudwick 11,  Hitch 5,  Dolphin 0,  Fender 0,  Hendren 0,  Howell 0,  Makepeace 0,  Parkin 0,  Russell 0,  Waddington 0,  Wilson 0.

Tour Officials

Selectors

Lord Harris (chairman),  ??

P.F.Warner was added to the selection panel, after being asked to attend the final meeting in an advisory capacity.

Selection

Unavailable:  Donald Knight (Sy) and George Wood (Kt) were unable to accept invitations.

Tour Party Announced :  Fifteen names were announced on 26 July.  Of these, Spooner and Barnes withdrew and their replacements were named on 20 August.

Withdrawals:  Reginald Spooner stood down as captain and Johnny Douglas was appointed.

Cecil Parkin took the place of Sydney Barnes, whose conditions that the fare of his wife and child should be paid were rejected.

M.C.C. allowed Vallance Jupp until 23 September to decide whether to accept a place. He decided late that he could not go and was replaced by Bill Hitch, who followed in a later ship.

Time between selection and departure from England

   29 days

 (20 August - 18 September

Travel

Tilbury      T      Fremantle

               ‘’Osterley’

A pre-tour match against C.I.Thornton's XI was played at Scarborough.

Twelve of the team left St Pancras by rail for Tilbury Docks on 18 September 1920, skipper Johnny Douglas having already boarded the ship overnight.  M.C.C. sailed on the 'Osterley', via Toulon (where Hobbs, Strudwick and Parkin, who left England on Thursday, joined the ship); then to Naples, Port Said and Ceylon, where a match was played.

The ‘Osterley’ reached Fremantle on the morning of 23 October 1920.  Because a steerage passenger who boarded at Naples had died from typhus (and was removed from the ship at Colombo), the vessel had to be quarantined. The players spent a week living in army huts at Woodman’s Point station and the three-day match against Western Australia had to be cancelled, and a one-day match played instead. The team left Perth by rail across the Nullarbor Plain arriving in Adelaide on 2 November

Bill Hitch who had left England on the ‘Malwa’ on 30 September, reached Adelaide the next day (3 November).

Time spent in Australia

    150 days

(23 October -  22 March)

On-tour selection panel

Johnny Douglas (captain),  Hobbs and Rhodes (senior professionals), with F.C.Toone (manager) present.

Reinforcements

None.  Abe Waddington went into hospital early in the tour for treatment to an abcess under his armpit. Hitch fractured a finger in the first game he played and then ricked his side muscles and missed the latter part of the tour. Russell missed four matches owing to a thumb injury

Jack Hearne, afflicted with lumbago in the second Test, reportedly then suffered from a bout of malaria and from lung problems and remained a long while in hospital in Adelaide. He was unable to resume playing on the tour but no replacement was deemed necessary.

Fixtures/Results

The Australian Cricket Board published the programme of fixtures on 26 July 1920

⋆  An extra practice match on 10 November. Douglas’s team made 108 and Wilson’s 140

Country matches against Bathurst and Stawell were eliminated from the programme at a late stage because they were too close to the Test matches

Owing to a strike by stewards, there was no shipping service from Melbourne to Launceston and the Tasmania matches were cancelled and two up-country games played instead

† not first-class

Time spent in Australia before First Test:  

 55 days

(23 October - 17 December)

;

Test appearances on tour

5 -   Douglas,  Hendren,  Hobbs,  Parkin,  Rhodes,  Woolley.

4 -   Makepeace,  Russell,  Strudwick

3 -   Fender,  Howell

2 -   Hearne,  Waddington

1 -   Dolphin,  Hitch,  Wilson.

0 - 

Match appearances

T  Test match

x other match 

p  practice match

 W won  L lost  D drawn

N no result   C  cancelled 

A abandoned

u unknown result

Highlights

•  Cecil Parkin took 8 wickets for 55 in the first innings of the tour at Adelaide

•  Patsy Hendren struck 271 against Victoria and topped 1000 runs but had a disappointing time in the Test series

•  Jack Hobbs scored 122 in the second Test at Melbourne

•  Hobbs played another great innings of 123 attempting to save the third Test and the Ashes at Adelaide

•  Earlier Jack Russell’s 135 not out at Adelaide had given England apparent safety with an innings of 447.

•  Johnny Douglas scored 60, 32, 50, 60, 32* and 68 in the last three Test matches.

Tour Summary

⋆ excluding practice match

Return to England

Adelaide      T      Toulon

               ‘’Osterley’

Toulon        t      London

The 'Osterley' came from Melbourne on 14 March and sailed via Adelaide where the team boarded for Fremantle on 17 March, arriving five days later. Boarding the same ship at Fremantle was Armstrong’s 1921 Australian touring party.

All disembarked from the ship at Toulon on 16 April and crossed France by train.

The M.C.C. team arrived at Dover from Calais at 5 o' clock on Sunday 17 April (the channel crossing was the roughest part of the voyage) and pulled into Victoria Station, London, at 8.45 pm.

Time away from England

  211 days  

(18 September  -17 April)

Finances

The M C C received half the gross gate income for each match and halfway through the tour was already assured of covering the tour costs.

Accounts of the tour

"Defending The Ashes"   by  Percy Fender (the only tour book)

Postscript