forget the war cries! love runs deep with the ashes
As England get set for battle with Australia, Alison Mitchell recounts the origins of the sport’s most storied ‘trophy’
If you jump in a car and drive north west out of Melbourne towards the Macedon ranges, you will pass a sign on the highway pointing you towards the ‘Birthplace of the Ashes’.
The town it directs you to is Sunbury, which, in 1989, used to have a population of some 15,000 and a motto of ‘City Living, Country Style’. The town has since seen vast expansion and the population is more like 39,000 as city dwellers escape steeper prices in Melbourne’s metropolitan area.
At the end of a winding road above the town sits Rupertswood Mansion. It is a cream coloured, ornate Victorian residence, with decorative white wrought iron gates and intricately designed balconies. It was built in 1874 in the Italianate style by Sir William John Clarke, the first Australian-born Baronet. Clarke was a land owner and philanthropist who came to Victoria from van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania, as it is now known.
These days the property is a boutique hotel playing host to weddings and functions, but in its heyday it was a high society home, whose owners Sir William and Lady Janet Clarke welcomed royalty, hosted dinner parties and organised balls.
In 1882/83, Ivo Bligh was the captain of the touring England team. The Clarkes were the most powerful family in Victoria and Bligh spent a great deal of time as a guest at Rupertswood. During a Christmas gathering, Sir John suggested he and members of the England team played a social game of cricket at Rupertswood against staff and other house guests.
The origins of the tiny trophy we know as the Ashes Urn are well documented, but the story is always worth hearing, particularly because the Urn was the centre piece of a love affair – a far cry from David Warner’s recent assertion that the Ashes has become fierce competition verging on war.
Last year I came across a lovely illustrated version of the Ashes love story in Melbourne, in the form of a children’s book called Burning the Bails by Krista Bell. It draws on historical facts from the Clarke family archive, but tells the story of the origin of the Ashes in a fictional way, from the perspective of Lady Clarke’s six-year-old son, Russell.
Bell writes that when the real Russell Clarke grew up, he said he was witness to the burning of a set of bails at Rupertwood and the creation of the actual Ashes. She thus uses her imagination to tell the story through the young child’s eyes. What is known and documented is that England were touring Australia in the wake of defeat to the Aussies at the Oval in 1882 – their first defeat on home soil.
That loss led to the Sporting Times publishing a mock obituary of English cricket. The immortal words were, “In affectionate remembrance of English cricket, which died at The Oval on 29th August, 1882, deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances. RIP. N.B, The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.”
Captain Bligh vowed that he would win back the Ashes and return them to England when they toured Australia the following winter. But the Ashes themselves were just a symbolic word at that point. When the Rupertswood cricket match took place, Bligh’s men won. During the course of Bligh’s visits to Rupertswood, Lady Clarke’s music teacher, Florence Morphy, had caught the attention of the dashing skipper. Morphy wasn’t of the same class or status as the honourable Ivo Bligh, who was later to become the eighth Earl of Darnley, but Morphy found her way into Bligh’s heart, possibly helped by the role
Whilst Bowral in New South Wales is famed as the childhood home of Sir Donald Bradman, Sunbury is less widely known for its significance in Ashes history
she played, alongside Lady Clarke, in mischievously burning a set of bails after the cricket match, then placing the ashes inside what some believe to have been one of Morphy’s perfume bottles (the Urn).
This ‘urn’ was then presented to Bligh, on the basis that these were the ‘ashes’ he had gallantly vowed to carry back to England. Bligh duly accepted the gift, and kept the Urn as a treasured possession, and a symbol of his affection for Morphy. A year later, he returned to Australia and married her. When Bligh died in 1927, his widow passed the Urn to the MCC. Whilst Bowral in New South Wales is famed as the childhood home of Sir Don Bradman, Sunbury is less widely known for its significance in cricket and Ashes history. It feels as if that is starting to change now, and it may well be that Sunbury gets more visitors than usual when England are in town ahead of the Boxing Day Test this year.
The town itself even has a clock tower that represents a cricket ball breaking a set of two-storey-high stumps. The monument was created by the town’s Rotary Club and presented to the citizens of Sunbury in January 1995 in recognition that their home was where the Ashes story began.