Bligh's 'Quest to Recover the Ashes' — 1882-83 Tour

After the August 1882 Oval defeat, the Sporting Times obituary became a press refrain. Bligh, then 23 and a Cambridge graduate of moderate playing ability, was approached to lead a private team to Australia in the southern summer.

Bligh's side sailed in October. On the way out their ship collided with another in the Bay of Biscay; Bligh injured his hand seriously enough that he could not bowl for the early matches. The team arrived in Melbourne on 11 November.

Bligh's XI was a privately-raised side, not a representative MCC tour. He took thirteen players including Charles Studd, the brothers Allan and Walter Read, Billy Bates and the Hon Alfred Lyttelton. They sailed on the Peshawar in late 1882, weathered a collision in the Bay of Biscay (Bligh injured his hand), and arrived in Melbourne in mid-November.

The tour began with a defeat in the first Test at Melbourne (30 December 1882 — Australia won by nine wickets), recovered with a win at Melbourne (19 January, the match in which Billy Bates took 14 wickets and a hat-trick), and was completed with a Sydney win on a sticky pitch (Bates again, plus Barlow's slow left-arm). The official three-Test series ended 2-1 to England.

A fourth match was added at the end of the tour, with combined teams and effectively in a different format; Australia won. Whether this counted as a Test (and whether the series was 'really' 2-2) has been disputed by historians for over a century.

It was during the trip — and most likely at Christmas 1882 at Sir William Clarke's Rupertswood estate at Sunbury, north-west of Melbourne — that the small terracotta urn was first presented to Bligh as a private joke. Lady Janet Clarke and her music teacher Florence Morphy were the prime movers. The urn, said to contain the burnt ashes of a bail (a veil, in some accounts), was rewrapped in a red velvet bag and presented again at Easter 1883 with a small verse pasted to its side.

Bligh stayed in Australia for several months after the tour. He fell in love with Florence Morphy and they married in February 1884. He brought the urn home as a personal gift; it would not be presented to MCC until after his death in 1927.

“We have come to recover those Ashes.”

“When you return to England you will take with you the Ashes.”

Bligh succeeded as the 8th Earl of Darnley in 1900. He and Florence had three children. The urn sat on his mantelpiece at Cobham Hall in Kent until his death in 1927; Florence then presented it to MCC, where it has remained. Replicas now travel between England and Australia each Ashes series.

Bates, the hero of the second Test, suffered a career-ending eye injury in the nets during the 1887-88 tour and tried (unsuccessfully) to take his own life. Spofforth's Australians retained the unofficial 'Ashes' through 1884.