Neville Tufnell was the
first to stump a batsman as a substitute wicketkeeper in Test cricket. At
First-Class level he was responsible for the third, fourth, and fifth such
instances.
In Aristocrats Go to War:
Uncovering the Zillebeke Cemetery, Jerry Murland makes mention of the All
Saints Church at Kenley, a district at the south of the London Borough of
Croydon, which has a memorial tablet dedicated to one Laura Gertrude Tufnell,
daughter of Dr William Parker Charsley of erstwhile Ceylon, who died at her
residence at Watendone Manor, aged 52, in 1911. Her husband Carleton Fowell
Tufnell was an insurance broker and underwriter, and, it may be added, a
First-Class cricketer, having played 8 First-Class matches and turned out for
Kent and the Gentlemen of Kent.
According to Murland, the
Tufnell family trace their ancestry back to one Richard Tufnell of Surrey, who
used to be the MP for Southwark in 1640. A series of favourable marital
alliances and public appointments had then swelled the family coffers through
the past generations. The males of the family had traditionally been to Eton,
and had generally excelled in sporting activities in addition to their academic
pursuits.
Carleton and Laura Tufnell
had raised a family of four sons and one daughter. The family had moved to
India at the end of the 1879 English domestic cricket season, and had welcomed
the birth of their second son Neville Charsley at Shimla on June 13, 1887.
Following the family custom, Neville was educated at Eton along with his
brothers. A grainy old black-and-white photograph of the Eton public school
cricket team of 1904 shows a fresh-faced young Neville squatting on the grass
in the front row. He gradually developed into a right-hand batsman and
wicketkeeper. The archives show him to have played 7 inter-school matches for
Eton between 1904 and 1906, in addition to playing for the Public Schools
against the MCC in 1905 and 1906.
In December 1906, a team of
amateur cricketers made a tour to New Zealand under the leadership of the army
man Teddy Wynyard. There were two wicketkeepers in the 15-man squad in Roland
Fox, a New Zealander by birth, and Tufnell. They were introduced to the
correspondent of the New Zealand Herald by skipper Wynyard as follows: “As
regards wicketkeeping, we have two excellent men in Fox and Tufnell, the former
being a native of New Zealand … I may say that Tufnell kept wickets for the
Eton Eleven this year, and he did his work well.”
The team left from Plymouth
on the White Star line steamer SS Corinthic on December 20. The tour was to
include 11 First-Class matches, 2 against representative New Zealand teams, 2
against each of the major provincial teams, Auckland, Canterbury, Otago and
Wellington, and 1 against Hawke’s Bay. Tufnell played in 7 of these, making his
First-Class debut against Auckland, registering a pair and not making any
dismissals in the game. In his inaugural First-Class season in New Zealand,
Tufnell enjoyed moderate success, scoring 203 runs with a highest of 85 and an
average of 25.37. He held 5 catches. Considering that he was still to shed the
‘schoolboy’ tag, Tufnell had a reasonably good tour.
For Tufnell, the logical extension
of his education after Eton was Cambridge, and he was enrolled in Trinity. A
member of the Cambridge University Cricket Club, Tufnell played 17 First-Class
matches for his University, scoring 392 runs with a highest of 102, his only
century, and an average of 15.68. He held 16 catches and made 28 stumpings.
Tufnell won his Blue in 1909 after the match against Oxford at Lord’s from in
1909, a drawn game in which he scored 7 and held 5 catches.
It was in his penultimate
match for Cambridge that he reached the zenith of his batting achievements in
First-Class cricket. Played against Gentlemen of England at Eastbourne in 1910,
the match ended in victory by the undergrads by 6 wickets. Cambridge scored
380, the foundation of the total being laid by opener Tufnell (102 in 105
minutes with 14 fours) and his second-wicket stand of 103 with Leslie Kidd. The
Gentlemen were bowled out for 163, Tufnell taking 3 catches. Following on, they
posted a 402, but Cambridge won by 6 wickets.
Whenever the story of the sixth
Test-playing England tour of South Africa is told, one enigmatic name always
figures in the tale, that of the Nottinghamshire batting stalwart George Gunn
Sr, not for his exploits on the tour, but for the reason why he was not on the
boat going over for the tour.
Keeping a wary eye on the
finances of the enterprise, the South African cricket authorities had requested
the MCC to send over a team of amateur cricketers to the African continent for
a Test tour. MCC then appointed ‘Shrimp’ Leveson Gower to the selection
committee for the tour on March 17, 1909, together with the other two
selectors, Lord Hawke (Chairman), and CB Fry, and gave him the added
responsibility of being the captain of the touring team. Despite best efforts,
the committee could not assemble of a complete touring party composed solely of
amateurs, and MCC informed the hosts that, even if they could, such a touring
party would not be of sufficient strength to put up a suitable show, and that
MCC would not wish to insult the hosts by arriving with an under-par team.
Accordingly, some professionals were included by bipartite consent among the
authorities.
Letters were despatched in
due course to the selected professionals in this regard. One of the letters was
sent to Trent Bridge with the name of the Nottinghamshire professional Gunn on
it. Legend has it that the somewhat absent-minded Gunn had put the letter in
his pocket without opening, and had then forgotten all about it. Consequently,
when Leveson Gower and his party of fourteen members boarded the Union Castle
line steamship Saxon from Southampton on November 6, Gunn was not on it, being
completely unaware that he had, in fact, been selected for the tour.
In the end, the squad that
disembarked at Cape Town on November 23 contained only five amateurs. The only
one in the group without any county experience whatever was Tufnell, the second
wicketkeeper of the team, still to complete his studies at Cambridge, and a
late addition to the squad, his name being appended to the team sheet in
September after the original team had been announced on August 30. This was to
be Tufnell’s second boat ride for an overseas cricket tour.
It was not a happy tour for
MCC, who lost the opening two Tests at Johannesburg and Durban, won the third,
again at Johannesburg, lost the fourth at Cape Town, and began the final Test
at Cape 1-3 down. There were three debutants in the Test, one for England, and
two for South Africa, and all three were playing in what was to be the only
Test of their careers. Leveson Gower, the original captain, had dropped out of
the contest after playing in the first 3 Tests (the only Tests of his career),
handing the reins of the touring party over to Fred Fane, the renowned Essex
opening batsman.
Though first-choice
wicketkeeper Herbert Strudwick was very much a part of the fifth Test line-up,
MCC chose to also include Tufnell the designated stumper. England began with
Jack Hobbs and Wilfred Rhodes. The first wicket fell at 221 when Rhodes (77)
was out. The stand, scored in 144 minutes, constituted a new record in Test
cricket at the time.
England were bowled out for
417 on the second morning. Tufnell contributed 14 to the total. South African
debutant Norman Norton was the most successful bowler with 4 for 47. The other
debutant, Sivert Samuelson, however, went wicketless. The South African innings
of 103 lasted only 135 minutes. Surprisingly, Hobbs opened the bowling for
England along with Colin Blythe, who claimed 7 for 46.
Invited to follow on, the
home team put up a much healthier 327. The fourth-wicket stand between Tip
Snooke (47) and Aubrey Faulkner (99) realised 120 in 104 minutes. Faulkner
became the first South African and the second overall (after Clem Hill in
1901-02) to be dismissed for 99 in Test history.
In the second innings,
Jimmy Sinclair was stumped by Tufnell off Blythe for 37, Tufnell’s only
dismissal of his Test career. England won by 9 wickets, thus conceding the
series 2-3 to the hosts. Interestingly, Tufnell, had, in fact, made another
Test stumping, but that was not credited to him in his cricket profile.
In the second Test, at
Lord’s, Durban, a match South Africa had won by 95 runs, Tufnell was not
selected in the playing XI, Strudwick being the popular choice. In the second
innings, however, Strudwick had had to leave the field for a while, being
injured when he was hit on the face by a ball, and Tufnell had been allowed to
substitute for him behind the stumps. Tufnell had ended the innings by stumping
Snooke (53). Tufnell thus ended up in the record books as being the first to
perform a stumping in Test cricket as a substitute wicketkeeper.
In common with the history
of the spread of cricket all over the world, the British were responsible for
the early inroads that the game made in South America in the early 19th
century. The early British immigrants were principally industrialists and
landowners with interests in banks and the railways. They brought with them
their customary social pursuits, their sporting activities, and even a Harrods
in Buenos Aires in 1912. It is estimated that by the 1930s, the British diaspora
in Argentina was the most populous outside the Commonwealth.
It was not long before
cricket began to blossom in the valleys of The Andes, and the first Argentinian
cricket club was established in 1831 at Buenos Aires. By 1868 the Argentines
felt confident enough of their cricketing skills to travel to Uruguay to play
their first international match. In 1893 an Argentine team made an arduous
three-day mule crossing of the Andes to play Chile. In 1912 they became the
fifth Association Country to be granted First-Class status. The Argentine
Cricket Association was formed in 1913.
In Real International
Cricket: A History in One Hundred Scorecards, Roy Morgan says that the
Argentine Cricket Championships Committee was formed to promote the game in the
country. By the early 1910s the Committee were pleasantly surprised by the
standard of cricket played by many of the immigrant British population. By
their own assessment of their strengths, ACA felt that they were now ready to
meet an English team on even terms. Accordingly, they issued an invitation to
MCC to pay a visit for a cricket tour.
Far from being affronted by
such an audacious invitation, MCC not only accepted the offer, but also
selected a fairly strong team of amateur cricketers for the tour, the party of
12 including five members with previous Test experience in skipper Hawke,
Archie MacLaren, Morice Bird, Arthur Hill, and Tufnell, though, as we have
seen, the young ’keeper’s Test experience was restricted to only one match.
Tufnell thus found himself
on a boat embarking on an overseas tour for the third time in his cricket
career, the vessel in question being the SS Asturias, departing from
Southampton on January 26, 1912. The MCC played 9 matches in Argentina on the
short tour, though only the 3 three-day games against a representative
Argentina team were accorded First-Class status. In this connection, it may be
pertinent to point out that most of the cricket played in Argentina during this
time revolved around expatriate Brits, some of whom had had previous experience
of competitive cricket in the Home Country, in South Africa, or Rhodesia, and
many of whom were at least of the Minor Counties level.
The story of how Argentina,
playing their first First-Class encounter in history, defeated MCC at
Hurlingham Club Ground, Buenos Aires, by 4 wickets has already been told in
these columns at an earlier date. Tufnell scored 5 and 2, held a catch, and
made a stumping in the game. It may be mentioned that Harold Garnett,
skipper-wicketkeeper of Argentina, was already a veteran County Championship
player, having been with Lancashire from 1899, and opening batsman Evelyn
Toulmin had been playing for Essex since 1899.
The victory over MCC in the
very first representative match provided an enormous boost to the confidence of
the home team. The second match was played at the Buenos Aires Cricket Club
Ground, and MCC restored some of their wounded pride by winning the match by
210 runs. Tufnell was not in the playing XI, William Findlay being the
designated wicketkeeper. This Findlay was to later have a distinguished career
in cricket administration, becoming MCC secretary from 1926 to 1936, Chairman
of MCC Commission on county cricket in 1937, and President of MCC from 1951 to
1952. In this game, however, Findlay became a footnote in history for another
interesting reason.
Hawke won the toss and the
MCC scored 266. Batting at No. 10, Findlay scored 21. When the home team
batted, they went in at the end of the day on 145 for 4. Findlay had already
done his bit in the field by stumping the CP Russ.
On the second day, however,
Findlay was indisposed and did not take the field. Indeed, he did not take any
further part in the game at all. Since the MCC touring party comprised only 12
men, permission was sought for Tufnell, the man sitting the match out, to
deputise for Findlay behind the stumps. Having obtained the gracious consent of
the Argentinian skipper and the umpires, Tufnell took the field for the
remaining two days.
Tufnell was soon in the
thick of the action, effecting the second stumping of the innings, sending back
Drysdale. Findlay did not bat in the second innings. When the fourth innings
got underway, Tufnell stumped Drysdale again, this time for 6, thus providing
an interesting instance of a substitute wicketkeeper stumping the same batsman
in each innings of a First-Class game.
The archives show that the
first instance in history of a batsman being dismissed stumped by a substitute
’keeper involved one Goddard of Hampshire, who was stumped by a man of unknown
identity at Lord’s in 1806. The third, fourth and fifth instances in the
history of First-Class cricket (including the first in Test cricket) were the
handiwork of Neville Tufnell, the first documented man to perform the feat.
History does not record the names of the ’keepers in the first two instances.
The final First-Class match
of the tour was played at the ground of Lomas Athletic Club, Buenos Aires. MCC
won by 2 wickets. In an interesting twist, Hawke opted out of this match and
performed the duties of one of the umpires for the game, with MacLaren leading
the side. Findlay and Tufnell both played in this match, Tufnell donning the
big gloves. It was a good game for Tufnell, who top-scored with 45* in the
first innings, and got 13 in the second, and held 4 catches. Overall, it was a
fairly satisfactory tour for MCC despite the defeat in the first game, and when
Hawke arrived back in England with his team, he would have felt that he had
done his bit to spread the gospel of cricket in Southern America.
During a First-Class career
spanning 1906-07 to 1924, Neville Tufnell played for as many as 13 teams, the
list including Surrey, the Army, Free Foresters, and the Gentlemen. In all, he
played 70 First-Class matches, scoring 1,514 runs at an average of 14.28. He
scored a hundred, held 62 catches, and made 40 stumpings. His last First-Class
match was for Free Foresters against Oxford in 1924, at 36, a rather late age
for an amateur. He scored 0 and 2 and held a catch
There was, of course,
another aspect to the life of Tufnell. He was a career soldier, being
commissioned in the 1st Volunteer Battalion (later the 4th Battalion) Queen’s
Royal West Surrey Regiment in 1908, while an undergraduate student at
Cambridge. He left the regiment before World War I with the rank of Captain,
later rejoining the same regiment in 1914 with the same rank. He transferred
later to the Grenadier Guards as a Special Reserve. When Albert Frederick
Arthur George of the royal House of Windsor ascended the British throne in 1936
as George VI, Tufnell was appointed a Gentleman Usher to His Royal Highness.
In 1939, Tufnell was
appointed as a Group Commander in the National Defence Companies with the rank
of Lieutenant-Colonel, later transferring to the King’s Royal Rifle Corps later
in the same year. With the end of hostilities in 1945 and the end of World War
II, as Europe gradually limped back to normalcy, Tufnell, now about 58, turned
to politics, contesting the Windsor division of Berkshire as a candidate in the
General Elections of 1945. It was not a pleasant experience for him as he
polled in third place and forsook his quest for any public office thereafter.
On a more personal front,
The London Standard went into minute details of his high-profile wedding to
Miss Sybil Carlos Clarke, second daughter of Charles Carlos Clarke of The
Woodlands, Sunninghill, Ascot on April 8, 1913. The society wedding was
attended by members of both families, and was presided over by the Rev. AR
Ingram, Vicar of Sunninghill. The father gave away the bride. The newlyweds
took up residence at Fairfield, Sunninghill, Berkshire, and raised a family of
two sons, born in 1914 and 1920, both of whom went into the Army in later life.
Neville Tufnell passed away
on August 3, 1951 at Whitechapel, aged 64.
Pradip Dhole is a retired medical practitioner with a life-long interest in cricket history and statistics – Courtesy – Cricketcountry.com