“Pray God, no professional shall ever captain England,” Lord Hawke, Yorkshire’s skipper and an MCC grandee, declared in 1925. “I love and admire them all, but we have always had an amateur skipper and when the day comes when we shall have no more amateurs captaining England it will be a thousand pities.”
Hawke’s words encapsulated the great divide in English cricket, and one heightened by the challenge the tourists faced Down Under: amateurs and professionals. Amateurs, who were notionally unpaid – though they received lavish expenses – and almost invariably from elite backgrounds, captained England in every Test match from 1887 until 1952. Professionals, salaried workers like in any other job, were considered unsuitable to lead no matter their cricketing ability.
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The chasm between the two groups extended far beyond socialising and invites to cocktail parties. Amateur and professionals stayed in different hotels, used different changing rooms and even entered grounds through different gates. At lunchtimes, it was common for amateurs to be greeted by butlers serving sherry, unbeknown to the professionals downstairs. The difference between the two groups was even visible on scoreboards, which referred to gentlemen such as P.B.H. May by their full initials and surnames, and professionals such as Fred Trueman simply by their surnames.
Not a problem in Australia
Australia never had any such divide. Until the 1980s, when the game turned fully professional Down Under, all Australian cricketers were effectively semi-professional: playing for money, but working in other jobs too.
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Without such social distinctions, Australia embraced a simple principle for selecting the captain: first pick the best 11 players; and only then choose the captain. For England, constrained by the convention that a captain should be an amateur, the process was altogether more torturous. For all the problems facing Ben Stokes’s England on the 2025-26 Ashes tour, at least they are not lumbered with a captain who is not worth his place in the side.
The different ways in which the two countries picked their captain only made the task facing England on their Ashes tours in the first half of the 20th Century tougher. England’s captain was seldom even worth his place in the best XI at all.
MCC – the Marylebone Cricket Club – assumed control of England tours in 1903. The first man that MCC chose to be captain on an Ashes tour was characteristic of the future men who filled the post. Pelham Warner, born in Trinidad, educated at Rugby School and Oxford University, and the son of the Attorney General. Warner averaged 27.66 as captain on the 1903-04 Ashes tour, which sounds modest yet was a significant upgrade on most men to lead England in Australia in the first half of the century.
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Pelham Warner was the ‘right sort of chap’ to lead an MCC Ashes tour – Getty Images
The first 10 Ashes tours organised by MCC, from 1903-04 to 1951-52, were all led by an amateur. England captains averaged 22.36 with the bat, failing to score a single century, and 34.11 with the ball across the 50 Tests.
In the same matches, Australia’s captains averaged a combined 52.30 with the bat, scoring 11 centuries, and 26.59 with the ball.
The most notorious example of an underperforming amateur captain was Arthur Gilligan. In 1924-25 Gilligan averaged 9.14 with the bat and 51.90 with the ball. During the tour, Gilligan, a member of the British Fascists, was suspected by the Australian secret services of setting up fascist groups Down Under. England lost 4-1.
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During the early years of the Ashes, Australia’s different approach to captaincy was a reason for their small, but enduring, edge. “I have heard some English captains speak to their professionals like dogs,” said Australia’s skipper Joe Darling, who played in the Ashes from 1894 to 1905.
Without the amateur-professional divide, Australia’s teams adopted a more collegiate approach. Australia’s captain “receives the benefit of the opinions of his comrades as if he were chairman of a board of directors”, noted Jim Phillips, who umpired 15 Ashes Tests during the 1890s. “The average English captain is more of an autocrat. He rarely seeks advice from his men. If a consultation be held it is invariably confined to the amateurs and the batsmen, not the professionals and the bowlers.”
English cricketers were aware of the absurdity of the distinctions, especially when players changed status. In 1938, Wally Hammond switched from professional to amateur to make him an acceptable choice as Test captain, though so late in his career that he was already well past his best. Hammond joined the board of directors of a tyre company, who guaranteed that he could play as much cricket as he liked.
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“I was the same man as before, or perhaps I even had a declining skill,” Hammond wrote. “But because I changed my label all was well… I submit this is illogical.”
England not the only country to pick on class
If this illogicality was uniquely English, other countries also weakened themselves when making their choice of captain.
On India’s first Test tour of England, in 1932, the Maharaja of Porbandar – richer than Croesus, but with scarcely more cricket ability – was named as captain. In four first-class matches on tour, Porbandar, who did not bowl at all, scored just two runs. Porbandar bought three Rolls-Royces on the tour and left with more new cars than runs. At least Porbandar had the self-awareness to recognise that he should not captain in the Test matches themselves. But No 9, he averaged 8.25 in the three Tests.
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More than anywhere else, captaincy had deeper resonance in West Indies. Until 1960, all permanent captains of West Indies were white; George Headley, who many had considered second only to Don Bradman among Test batsmen, performed the role as a one-off in 1948.
The policy of only choosing white men to be captain weakened West Indies. From their first Test, in 1928, until Frank Worrell’s first Test as skipper in 1960, the West Indies’ white batsmen in the top seven averaged only 28.04; other batsmen in the top seven averaged 42.15 during this period. In 1948, Andy Ganteaume, a man of black and Indian descent, scored 112 on debut against England, yet was dropped and never played again.
Frank Worrell, seen here on the left walking out to be with fellow famous ‘W’ Everton Weekes, was the first permanent black captain of West Indies – Getty Images
The simpler process by which Australia picked their captain compared to England and other rivals gave the side another advantage on the field.
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In 1954-55, for the first time in half a century, England adopted Australian logic for an Ashes tour: selecting the best man to be captain, regardless of class. Len Hutton duly led England to a 3-1 series win: a victory not just for his country, but for the professionals too.
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