#tour organisation

2 incidents tagged

Major Warton's Tour — How the First English Side Got to South Africa, 1888-89

R.G. Warton's XI (England) v South African sides

1888-12-01

The first English cricket tour of South Africa was organised not by MCC or any official body but by a retired British army officer, Major Robert Gardner Warton, working with two Cape Town agents (Billy Simkins and William Milton) and underwritten by the shipping magnate Sir Donald Currie. Warton went to England in 1888 to recruit professionals; the resulting team — captained by the amateur C. Aubrey Smith — sailed in November and played the matches that were later, in 1903, given retrospective Test status as South Africa's first Tests.

#major-warton#south-africa#1888-89

⭐Moderate

Shaw, Shrewsbury & Lillywhite — The 1880s Private Tour Trio

Private English XI v Australia

1881-09-15

Through the 1880s, three Nottinghamshire and Sussex professionals — Alfred Shaw, Arthur Shrewsbury and James Lillywhite — organised three private English tours of Australia (1881-82, 1884-85, 1886-87) outside MCC channels. They paid their own players, kept the gate receipts, and demonstrated that professionals could run international cricket as a business. Their model prefigured Packer's World Series Cricket nearly a century later.

#alfred-shaw#arthur-shrewsbury#james-lillywhite