The Birth of the Ashes: The Amazing Story of the First Ashes Test

Author: Christopher Hilton

The Birth of the Ashes: The Amazing Story of the First Ashes Test

What is the reality behind the mythology of The Ashes? The amazing and unexpected answers are revealed in this deeply researched book which will fascinate every cricket lover round the world. Here, for the Birth time, the Oval Test match of 1882 – every bit as dramatic as anything in the 2005 season – is recreated ball by ball all the way to the agonising climax when Australia won by 7 runs.
Here, too, is the social context of that match, from the founding of Australia, spiced with a host of insights into how cricket was born and how it grew in a vast, rugged land - and how the Australians first came to England to take on the Mother Country.
The story of The Ashes is more, much more. When the Hon. Ivo Bligh took an England team to Australia in 1882–83 he said he was going to reclaim the Ashes of English cricket, lost at the Oval.
That led to a meeting with a property baron near Melbourne, an invitation for the team to stay at his mansion for Christmas … a knock-about match against the staff … and the baron’s wife, who had a little urn on her mantelpiece. She felt she ought to put some ashes into it for Bligh.
It led Bligh to a love affair with an Irish music teacher at the mansion, marriage and residence in his family mansion in Kent. It was this Irishwoman who, in 1927 when Bligh died, carried out his final instructions and sent the urn to be displayed at Lord’s, where it remains today as the living symbol of 130 years of titanic struggle between the old enemies.