George Parr's Twelve to North America — The First Overseas Cricket Tour, September-October 1859

Cricket was already established in eastern Canada and the United States. The St George's Club of New York had organised an annual USA v Canada match since 1844 — the first international cricket fixture of any kind. The 1859 tour was a long-discussed extension of that fixture: the suggestion that a strong English side might tour had been canvassed for several years, but only in 1859 did Pickering and Wright provide enough financial guarantee to make it happen.

Six AEE and six UAEE players were chosen as a deliberate political balance — the post-Clarke reconciliation in action. Parr, the AEE captain, led the side; Wisden, the UAEE founder, was his senior bowler. Fred Lillywhite, son of William, was the manager and dragged his printing press across the Atlantic so that scorecards could be produced on the spot.

The tour was promoted by the Montreal merchants W.P. Pickering and W. Sykes Wright in conjunction with the St George's Cricket Club of New York and Fred Lillywhite, who acted as manager and shipped his portable printing press across the Atlantic. The twelve professionals were drawn from across the English game, six from the AEE and six from the UAEE — a deliberate piece of cricket diplomacy made possible by the post-Clarke reconciliation: George Parr (capt), James Grundy and John Jackson from Nottinghamshire; William Caffyn, Tom Lockyer and Julius Caesar from Surrey; John Wisden and John Lillywhite from Sussex; Robert Carpenter, Thomas Hayward and Alfred Diver from Cambridgeshire. The party met at the George Hotel in Liverpool on 6 September and sailed the next morning on the SS Nova Scotian, of the Allan Line, bound for Quebec. Atlantic storms made the crossing rough; the players feared for their lives, and Wisden later said the voyage was worse than anything he had experienced. They reached Quebec on 22 September and travelled overland to Montreal. The first match against XXII of Lower Canada began on 24 September in front of a crowd of around 3,000 — England won by eight wickets. Two matches each at Montreal, Hoboken (the Elysian Fields, home of the St George's Club), Philadelphia and Hamilton followed, with a closing fixture at Rochester. England won all five games — three by an innings, one by ten wickets, one by six. Three exhibition matches were also played in which the twelve Englishmen split and added five locals to each side. The party sailed home from New York and arrived back in Liverpool in early November.

“On their voyage from Liverpool to Quebec City on board SS Nova Scotian, the Englishmen feared for their lives as storms raged in the Atlantic.”

England's clean sweep of all five matches confirmed the gap between English professional cricket and North American club cricket. The financial returns were modest but adequate; the commercial template — promoter, shipping line, gate receipts, scoring printer — would be copied by Spiers and Pond for the 1861-62 Australian tour two years later. Fred Lillywhite's tour book, published in 1860 with the help of his portable press, was the first book ever written about a cricket tour.