Charles Lawrence — From Stephenson's Tour to Australia's First Professional Coach, 1862

Australian colonial cricket in 1862 was a vigorous club game played to no shared standard. The Albert Cricket Club at Redfern, founded in 1852, was Sydney's leading professional outfit and had been searching for a coach who could lift the standard of New South Wales cricket toward Victorian and English levels. Lawrence's English Test pedigree and his willingness to settle made him the obvious appointment.

Lawrence had developed a taste for colonial life on the Stephenson tour itself. The Albert Club approached him during the Sydney leg of the tour in February 1862. The £300 offer (the equivalent of more than £30,000 in modern money) settled the question.

Lawrence (born Hoxton, London, 16 December 1828) had a remarkable cricket pedigree before the 1861-62 tour. At seventeen he was engaged by the Perth Cricket Club in Scotland; in 1849, playing for an All-Scotland XX against William Clarke's All-England Eleven, he took all ten English wickets in an innings for 24 runs. In 1856 he formed and captained the United All Ireland XI, where he became friends with Tom Wills, then playing for Ireland. After joining the 1861-62 Stephenson tour as the Middlesex representative, Lawrence accepted the Albert Club's coaching offer and stayed behind when the team sailed home in March 1862. The financial terms — £300 a year, more than a senior English county professional could earn — made him one of the highest-paid cricket employees in the British Empire. He took match-winning figures of 14 for 73 against Victoria in his first season as NSW captain, opened a sports outfitters in George Street and ran an inn that became a meeting-place for the colonial cricket community. After Tom Wills withdrew from the Aboriginal coaching project in early 1867, Lawrence took it over, organised the 1868 English tour from Sydney rather than from Melbourne to escape the Victorian government, and captained the side throughout the English summer. The tour lost about £2,000 of his money. He sold the Sydney inn to clear the debt, moved to Newcastle and took a 24-year position as an official with NSW Railways. From 1891 he coached the juniors of the Melbourne Cricket Club for eight years. He died in 1916 at the age of 88.

“I made my home in Sydney and have never regretted it.”

Lawrence's coaching protégés included Charles Bannerman, who scored the first Test century in 1877. His Albert Club methods — net practice, professional coaching, structured fielding drills — were copied by clubs across the colonies. The colonial professional coaching pattern he helped establish in Sydney was extended by William Caffyn in Melbourne and by John Conway later in the 1870s.