Clem Hill and Peter McAlister Come to Blows — Sydney, February 1912

Hill had captained Australia for two seasons. McAlister, a former Test batsman and now a Board appointee, resented Hill and the player establishment.

Through summer 1911-12 McAlister had publicly criticised Hill's batting and captaincy. The 3 February meeting was the third selection sitting in two weeks.

Hill, McAlister and Frank Iredale were the three selectors charged with picking the Australian team for the fifth Test of the 1911-12 Ashes. McAlister, a Board nominee and a former Test player who fancied himself as captain, had been needling Hill all summer. The selection meeting on 3 February in Bull's Chambers, Sydney, deteriorated as McAlister suggested Hill was a poor captain and a bad batsman. Hill, by his own later account, told McAlister to repeat the words. McAlister did. Hill struck him. The two grappled across the table, fell to the floor, and exchanged blows for what witnesses said was twenty minutes before being separated. Both were bloodied. Iredale was reportedly too shocked to intervene. The incident became public almost immediately. McAlister's bruising lined up with his subsequent role as the Board's man on the selection committee that would, weeks later, refuse to compromise on the manager dispute. The Big Six players' walk-out followed within months. The Bull's Chambers fight is the personal flashpoint that lit the longer fuse of 1912.

“I told him to take that back. He didn't. So I hit him.”

Hill resigned the captaincy. The dispute fed directly into the Big Six players' refusal to tour England under a Board-appointed manager. Cricket Australia's official history records the Bull's Chambers fight as the personal trigger of the 1912 dispute.