TOM WILLS was one of the most brilliant and controversial, yet also tragic, figures in Australian sporting history. His excellence at cricket and football gained him renown from Melbourne to Marylebone, yet he ended his days by taking his own life, disowned by family and friends and sunk into alcoholism and despair.
As will be seen he also had Leinster and Ireland connections, not just cricket ones. Born Thomas Wentworth Spencer Wills on 19 March 1835, he was the eldest of the five children of Horatio Wills and Elizabeth McGuire.
Horatio, a wealthy and largely self-made man, was a sheep farmer and politician, whose own father, Edward Spencer Wills – according to some fantasists an illegitimate offshoot of the Churchill family – had been transported from London for highway robbery, while Elizabeth’s parents were Irish, both having also been transported felons. I have been unable to discover their origins or crimes.
Tom grew up on Horatio's property near where the city of Canberra now stands, the only children of his own age being the local Aborigines, with whom he played, learning their language and, possibly also, taking note of the games they played, involving catching, kicking and throwing a ball like object.
At the age of 14, Tom was sent to school at Rugby in Warwickshire. Horatio’s plan was that this should be followed by Cambridge University and a return to Australia as a lawyer. Not for the last time Tom disappointed his family.
He took to four parts of Rugby life like a duck to water – cricket; cross country running; the School's own brand of football which often involved some 50 players a side, where he became a place and drop kicker whose prowess an O'Gara or Sexton would envy; and beer drinking, very much a part of life at the School.
He ignored academic work, however, so that, though he had passed his 20th birthday when he finally left, he scarcely progressed from the bottom form!
As a cricketer, just under six feet in height, he was a formidable lower order batsman, using a 3lb bat to despatch the ball to all corners of the ground, though his style was far from orthodox. As a bowler, he soon abandoned the underarm style, then prevalent in Australia, settling for a slinging round-arm delivery, which generated some pace. Often accused of throwing, he was also, on the uncertain wickets of the time, a danger to life and limb.
Team-mates in the School side included future Cambridge blue William Kempson and Edward Vicars, both of whom, by virtue of military service, were later to play for Ireland. His inability to progress academically probably made him a class-mate of John Butler who as Earl of Lanesborough would gain a solitary Irish cap.
Tom's feats for Rugby gained him fame, his bowling being far too much for not only school opponents, but also against adult sides as 10 wickets in the match against I Zingari in 1853 demonstrates. His first-class debut came in 1854 and saw him play for MCC, Kent and the Gentlemen of Kent, for whom in a non-first-class match in 1855 against their Sussex counterparts, he took nine second innings wickets, the tenth falling to the great all-rounder Alfred Mynn.
Having eventually to leave school in 1855, Tom found that even in those halcyon days of Muscular Christianity, he could not achieve Cambridge entrance. However he remained in England and, declining an invitation to join the professional All England XI, continued the following summer, 1856, to play for MCC and other sides, Horatio nobly still sending him the wherewithal to support himself.
Attending Lord's for the University match, he, with the agreement of Oxford, came into the Cambridge side when they were – apparently – one short at the last minute. He was later to make a practice of this in Australian cricket.
He made little contribution to a three wicket victory in which the Cambridge side was captained by Joseph McCormick, an all-rounder of great ability, who was later to be, briefly, Church of Ireland Rector of Dunmore East, before becoming Queen Victoria’s chaplain.
In the late summer Tom spent a month in Ireland. His purpose appears to have been to play as much cricket as possible. He began by playing a leading part in a victory for Birkenhead Park against Phoenix, greatly impressing the hosts’ professional Charles Lawrence, with whom he struck up a friendship which was,12,000 miles away and over a decade later, to change to animosity. He also played for the Gentlemen of England against Ireland, in what is now regarded as the host side’s second official match. Strangely he did not bowl in the match and failed with the bat in the first innings being stumped off McCormick for 1. However his second innings 17 was to prove vital in the visitors' narrow victory.
The Gentlemen then reinvented themselves as MCC and, aided now by McCormick, played The Vice-Regal Lodge XVI. The visitors won by an innings with Tom, again not called upon to bowl – were there doubts about his action or did his captain fear for the safety of opposition batsmen? – but again batted usefully, his powerfully made 33 being top score of the match. Lawrence dismissed him, caught by Ireland's first captain John Coddington. Then Tom was off to Cork with his new found friend Charles Lawrence and the United Ireland XI, reinforced not only by Tom but also by McCormick and other members of the MCC side. McCormick and Lawrence twice routed the Cork men for whom Kempson made the top score of 13, but Tom did not bowl. However he made 25 at no 8, just shading McCormick as the highest scorer in the match. It has been suggested that during his time in Ireland he also watched, and perhaps played, Gaelic football.
After this season, however, he felt compelled to return home, where his father vainly articled him to a firm of solicitors. He was welcomed onto the cricket fields of Melbourne and beyond, introducing round arm bowling and the practice of tossing for choice of innings, the local custom having been to give this to the visitors.
He took 10 wickets on his debut for Victoria v New South Wales, though the match was lost. In this game he played under the captaincy of WJ Hammersley, an Englishman whom he had met playing for MCC. Hammersley was a journalist who would later become a well-nigh vitriolic critic of Tom, though they always respected each other's abilities.
After this match Tom became captain of Victoria and, until his decline set in some ten years later, swept all before him and inter colony matches. He took 98 wickets for Victoria with 12 five-fers.
Looking to find employment – he was never going to knuckle down to the law – he briefly became Secretary of Melbourne Cricket Club, a role in which he proved to be utterly disorganised and chaotic.
He was not available to play against the first English tourists of 1861-62 as he had accompanied his father and some 20 others on a hazardous journey to the Queensland Bush with some 10,000 sheep to establish a farm at Cullinaringo near Rockhampton.
The local Aborigines were frequent visitors to the camp but Horatio believed them to be harmless and felt he had established good relations with them. Tom and two other men had to leave the camp for stores, a journey of several days, and returned to find that all but one of the settlers had been massacred, in what was the worst such incident in Australian history, though many more Aborigines were killed by white attacks.
The Cullinaringo killings may have been a reprisal for such an event or may simply have been carried out to secure the large amount of stores and weapons on view. Either way, the Aborigines were hunted down and many more than had taken part in the killings were shot. Tom remained in Queensland for two years in an attempt to keep the homestead going, but in 1863, he was lured back to Melbourne by the arrival of a second and stronger English team, captained by the legendary George Parr of Nottinghamshire.
His younger brothers Cedric and Horace took over the sheep farming and their descendants still live in the area today. Tom played against Parr's side on several occasions both for local sides in Victoria and New South Wales as well as in New Zealand. He also continued to shine against NSW, now captained by Lawrence, who had remained in Sydney after the 1861/62 tour. In 1869, for example, Tom took 7/44, his career best, though by this time his whole life was in decline.
His drinking was losing him friends, costing him far too much money and badly affecting his relationship with his family. Financial shortages also meant that he was always on the look-out for employment as a cricket coach. Difficulties arose because, though he had always admired professional cricketers he still regarded himself as a ‘gentleman’ and found it difficult to be seen as one of them.
He also greatly upset his mother and sister by abandoning his proposed marriage to a Julie Anderson and taking up with a young Dublin-born woman Sarah Barbor, recently arrived in Melbourne and abandoned by her husband. She was never accepted by the Wills family but was to remain with Tom until his death.
In 1866 he became coach to the first team of Aborigine cricketers, which may seem strange considering what had happened at Cullinaringo. However he was able to develop their undoubted talents, being able to speak their language thanks to his childhood and clearly bore them no grudges.
Together with the prospective manager WR Hayman, he brought his team to Sydney in 1867. Here they stayed in the hotel which Lawrence ran on the pier at Manly, just on the ocean side of the entrance to Sydney Harbour.
A tour of England was planned. However their financial backer WEB Gurnett turned out to be a con man, whose financial irregularities were considerable. Tom was arrested for debt and though he was soon released, the damage had been done. He began to lose influence with the team as it toured NSW. Whether for altrustic reasons, or because he wrongly as it turned out - saw considerable finaancial gain, Lawrence began to involve himself with the players.
Tom is also generally credited with having been the founder of Australian Rules Football. He had set the ball rolling in 1858 with a letter to the press in which he advocated the playing of ‘Foot-Ball’ so that cricketers might keep fit during the winter. This led to a meeting, also attended by Hammersley, from which the first code of ‘Ozzie Rules’ emerged. Some historians have claimed that Gaelic Football was a strong influence here and that Tom might perhaps have played during his stay in Ireland. Others have suggested that the Aborigine pastime of Min’gorm may have been an influence on Tom, considering his childhood.
His most recent biographer, Greg De Moore, believes both these theories to be unlikely and concludes that Tom, with others agreeing, simply adapted the game he had played with success at Rugby School.
During the 1870s all Tom’s problems grew worse. Though still accompanied by the ever faithful Sarah, he became as David Frith has written “a complete and dangerous and apparently incurable alcoholic”. He was clearly haunted by the memories of Cullinaringo and had also to battle with his loss of place among the great sportsmen of his day. With Sarah he set up home in the village of Heidelburg, now a Melbourne suburb.
Confined in hospital in Melbourne, both for his and Sarah's safety, he escaped and returned home. On 2 May 1880, evading Sarah's attempts to restrain him, he grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors, and plunged it into his chest, just above his heart, three times. He was dead within minutes.
Despite his last years he was widely mourned. Even old rivals such as Hammersley and Lawrence praised him fondly while his brother Cedric recalled him as “the sweetest man I ever knew”.
A statue of Wills was erected outside of the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 2002.
Note: A great deal has been written about Tom Wills. For those who wish to pursue his life further the Greg De Moore biography ‘Tom Wills First Wild Man of Australian Sport’ is much the best source. I have also found David Frith’s ‘By His Own Hand’ a riveting but gloomy account of cricket's suicides most helpful, while for the Aborigine tour the second edition of John Mulvany’s ‘Cricket Walkabout’ is also very good.