Turner & Ferris — 534 Wickets Between Them, 1888

The 1888 Australian side was a small touring squad of 14, of whom only 11 played any cricket of consequence. Captain McDonnell relied on Turner and Ferris from the first match to the last; the other bowlers were essentially holders.

Both men had made their Test debuts in January 1887 at Sydney. By the start of the 1888 tour they were the established Australian opening attack.

Charles Thomas Biass Turner was a right-arm fast-medium bowler with a sharp off-cutter; John James Ferris a left-arm medium-paced swing bowler. Both came from NSW, both had made their Test debuts together at Sydney in January 1887. By the 1888 tour they were Australia's strike pair, bowling in tandem across an English summer that turned out to be unusually wet.

In 36 first-class matches Turner took 283 wickets at 11.68 runs apiece, with 30 five-wicket innings hauls and 12 ten-wicket match hauls. Ferris took 220 wickets at 14.10. Between them they delivered 534 of the 663 wickets the Australian touring side captured all summer — a workload that has never been repeated by a touring bowling pair.

The Lord's Test of July 1888 was their joint masterpiece — Turner 5/27 and 5/36, Ferris 5/26 and 3/26 in a match that saw 27 wickets fall in a single day. England came back to win the series 2-1 (with help from Lohmann and Peel) but the Turner-Ferris record remained.

When Wisden published its inaugural Cricketers of the Year list in 1889, both were named. Turner went on to be the first Australian to take 100 Test wickets, an Australian Cricket Hall of Famer (inducted 2012), and lived until 1944. Ferris had a stranger career: he played for Australia in eight Tests and then, after qualifying for Gloucestershire, for England in one Test against South Africa in 1891-92. He died young, aged 33, in South Africa during the Second Boer War.

“The two great Australians took 534 of the 663 wickets to fall to the Australians.”

Turner played for Australia until 1895, finishing with 101 Test wickets at 16.53. Ferris's switch of nationality is one of the rarities of cricket history. He played his single English Test in March 1892 at Cape Town, took 13 for 91 in the match (still one of the better debut analyses of all time, although for his second country), and died in Durban in 1900 after enlistment in the Boer War.