Pelham 'Plum' Warner, the Trinidad-born Oxford-educated Middlesex amateur, captained the first MCC team to tour Australia under the club's name in 1903-04 and won that series 3-2. The tour established the convention that English overseas tours were thereafter MCC enterprises rather than private commercial ventures, an institutional change in international cricket whose effects lasted until 1977.
Before 1903-04, English overseas tours had been private commercial enterprises run by professional impresarios — Lord Sheffield, Bligh, Stoddart. The MCC's assumption of the tour responsibility was an institutional transition that Warner symbolised.
Warner had been born at Trinidad in 1873, the son of the Attorney-General of the colony, and educated at Rugby and Oriel College, Oxford. He had played for England in South Africa in 1898-99 and was an established Middlesex amateur by 1903. The MCC was approached in 1902 to organise an English tour to Australia after the previous private arrangements had become commercially difficult; Warner was selected captain of the first MCC-branded touring side, which won the 1903-04 Ashes 3-2 with R.E. Foster's 287 the headline act. Warner's tour management — meticulous, diplomatic, attentive to local customs — set the standard the MCC followed for the next seventy years. He continued to lead Middlesex through the decade and to write copiously about cricket in the press; his books *Cricket in Many Climes* and *How We Recovered the Ashes* were widely read.
1898-99: Warner's Test debut, England in South Africa
1903-04: Captains MCC's first official Australian tour, won 3-2
1908-09: Captains MCC's second tour of Australia
1898-99
Test debut, England in South Africa
1903-04
Captains first MCC tour of Australia, won 3-2
1908-09
Captains second MCC tour of Australia
1932-33
Tour manager during Bodyline series
The captain who normalised the MCC overseas tour, the Test captain of the 1903-04 victory, and the figure who would dominate English cricket administration into the 1940s.
Warner became the central figure in English cricket administration in the 1920s and 1930s and chaired the selectors during the 1932-33 Bodyline tour, where his role as tour manager was the most uncomfortable of his career. The MCC tour convention he established lasted until cricket's commercial restructuring in the 1970s.
Yorkshire v Essex
1932-06-16
On 15-16 June 1932 Herbert Sutcliffe (313) and Percy Holmes (224*) put on 555 for the first wicket against Essex at Leyton, breaking the world first-class record for any wicket and adding a layer of folklore — including a scoreboard that read 554 for several minutes and a hastily reversed declaration — that has clung to the partnership ever since.
Australia v England
1933-02-14
With the fate of the Bodyline series in the balance and England 216 for 6 chasing 340, Eddie Paynter checked himself out of a Brisbane hospital where he was being treated for acute tonsillitis, taxied to the Gabba in pyjamas and a dressing gown, and batted for nearly four hours to score 83. England drew level on first innings, won the Test by six wickets and the series 4-1.
Australia
1934-09-25
Days after the 1934 Oval Test, Bradman fell seriously ill with appendicitis that progressed to peritonitis. With antibiotics not yet available, he was given little chance of survival; his wife Jessie left Adelaide on a sea voyage to England prepared for the worst. He recovered after weeks of intensive nursing in a London nursing home and returned to first-class cricket the following Australian summer.