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

Tours to Australia until the late 1870s had been organised by individual entrepreneurs (the All-England XI, MCC patrons, Lillywhite Sr.). The Shaw-Shrewsbury partnership was the first sustained professional partnership to run tours commercially.

The 1881 Notts strike forced Shaw and Shrewsbury out of county cricket for the late part of that season. The free time produced the first tour.

After the Notts strike of 1881 was settled, Shaw and Shrewsbury — barred from county cricket for part of the season — used the time to organise their own tour to Australia, sailing in October 1881. James Lillywhite, the Sussex professional and former English captain, joined as the third partner. They took an XI of professionals, paid match fees on a defined scale, and kept the rest of the gate.

The 1881-82 tour included four matches that have since been retrospectively granted Test status. Australia won 2-0 (with two draws). The trio cleared a substantial profit.

They returned in 1884-85 — the tour disrupted by the Australian player strike — and again in 1886-87. The 1886-87 tour was a five-Test affair (effectively the Ashes) that England won 2-0. Their model — selling tickets, paying players, organising travel — was a cricket precursor of every subsequent commercial sports tour.

The trio's success came at a price. They were viewed with suspicion by MCC and by the various colonial associations, who preferred the more familiar pattern of patron-financed amateur tours. The Lord Sheffield tour of 1891-92 — financed by an aristocrat with WG Grace as captain — was a deliberate counter-model, and Shaw-Shrewsbury-Lillywhite never organised another tour after 1888.

“We professionals can run a tour as well as any amateur committee.”

Shrewsbury continued playing for Notts and England until 1893. He suffered from depression and hypochondria in retirement and shot himself at his home in Gedling, Notts, in 1903. Shaw lived until 1907; Lillywhite until 1929 (he was the longest-lived survivor of the inaugural 1877 Test).

The commercial model the trio established was eclipsed by MCC-organised tours from the 1900s onwards but resurfaced in modern form when Kerry Packer set up World Series Cricket in 1977.