'The Demon' — How Spofforth Got His Nickname, 1878

Cricket nicknames in the 19th century were usually descriptive ('Lumpy', 'Silver Billy') or family ('W.G.'). 'The Demon' was the first to be coined as a deliberate stage-name and to spread on the back of a single performance.

Spofforth had been bowled out for a duck himself and was already in a fierce mood. When MCC followed on with Grace at the crease, he opened the second innings to him.

Spofforth was 24 and on his first tour of England. He was tall, lean, and bowled with a long stride and a high arm. Before the Lord's match he had been merely the Australians' fastest bowler. After bowling Grace — the most famous batsman in the world — first ball, he became the man with a nickname. Tom Horan, his teammate and later cricket writer, recorded the dressing-room scene exactly. Within weeks the name had spread in the English press; in the autumn, the satirical magazine Vanity Fair commissioned a 'Spy' (Leslie Ward) caricature captioned 'The Demon Bowler'. The image — Spofforth in his famous follow-through, glaring under heavy brows — became one of cricket's most reproduced cartoons. There is also a sober explanation: Spofforth's bowling action was unusually intimidating, with long arms whirling from a great height and a stride that crashed down at the crease. Either way, no other bowler of the 19th century carried so striking a name.

“He jumped about two feet in the air, and in the dressing-room he said 'Ain't I a demon? Ain't I a demon?' gesticulating the while in his well-known demoniac style.”

Spofforth used the nickname himself in correspondence; he signed letters 'The Demon' for the rest of his life. The phrase entered cricket vocabulary as a generic term — 'a demon bowler' came to mean any unusually quick or hostile fast bowler.