Young Vic (Max Bonnell, Red Rose Books)

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In the Summer 2024-25 issue of 1876, the annual magazine for members of the Sydney Cricket Ground, Gideon Haigh wrote, yet again, about his reasons for not undertaking a “conventional biography” of Victor Trumper (1):  ​"I…experienced misgivings. Three previous biographers [Jack Fingleton in 1978, and Peter Sharpham and Ashley Mallett both in 1985] had struggled to make much of [Vic]. The primary material was thin, his period remote, his contemporaries long gone, and the mythology thick indeed."

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Haigh contended that “legend is an uneasy companion of biography, if not an outright enemy”. His compromise (a “bargain struck with the past”) was to focus largely on Trumper lore. To this end, he argued persuasively that an iconic, increasingly pervasive, image of the beau ideal has helped to consolidate and extend Victor’s stature as a combination of peerless cricketer and modest man. While Trumper’s timeless reputation was thereby enhanced, others, many of whom had superior records to the Australian’s first-class career statistics, and who possessed both sublime sporting talent and indomitable spirit, suffered from a naturally progressive diminution of their glory day brilliance. What they were lacking was the lustre of “an aesthetic signature”. Such an appealing perspective.

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This recent “nostalgia” 1876 essay concluded with the explicit suggestion that George Beldam’s 1905 action photograph of Trumper ‘Stepping Out’ prevented his subject from becoming “no more than a distant name with a fading echo, a statistical remnant buried deep beneath a century’s further achievement”. Haigh doubts wherever an older version of himself would have appreciated the long since departed cricketer’s credentials, had he not been exposed as a youngster to such a photograph resonant of the gaiety and gallantry of unorthodox batsmanship. (2) Bold as this statement is, it rings hollow.  However, that's not the focus of this review, rather more of a preface to the main story.  Perhaps for the efforts of a future biographer but still, nevertheless, pertinent to what follows.

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Well credentialed Australian cricket historian and prolific author, Max Bonnell, has taken the bit between the teeth and tested the depth of Victor Trumper’s immortality. In an engaging new publication, Young Vic: The Early Life of Victor Trumper, to be published in March 2025, Bonnell looks beyond what has gone before and asks whether there's any genuine opportunity to advance our appreciation of the roots of Trumper's artistry and talent - his "genius".  In so doing, he suggests an avenue of historic enquiry that has lain dormant for well over a century.

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Bonnell concurs with Haigh regarding previous efforts to explore, at least the early decades, of Trumper’s life, describing them as “imperfect” investigations. He strives, in his forensically clinical way, to examine how “an illegitimate child, born into hardship, with no cricket in his family and no material advantages, became the most memorable cricketer of his generation”. With the rationale for the book explicit upfront, Bonnell’s focus remains true to purpose throughout. In hindsight, however, he may have considered modifying his depiction of intent to include just Australian-based players. While Trumper’s unique credentials were heralded widely throughout the cricketing globe, his batting talents were far from universally acclaimed in the ‘Motherland’ after two lacklustre Ashes tours, with several English heroes of the first decade of the 20th Century held in higher esteem. A minor issue but one warranting consideration.

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The author is at his best when discussing Trumper’s ancestry. He begins by dispensing with the historically thorny issue of illegitimacy, a matter which had proved, under advisement, an unnecessary confounder, a bridge too far, for biographers Fingleton and Mallett. In the 1870s and beyond in colonial Australia, as in the Motherland, bastardry was still a blight on the character of all concerned - parents and children alike. So it remained for some, or so it seemed, a century later.

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Distancing himself from such concerns, Bonnell argues persuasively, and for a range of reasons, as to why Charles Trumper and his wife Louisa (née Coghlan) are unlikely both to be Victor’s biological parents. He speculates then that there is some possibility that Louisa may be his mother. Exploring all ancestral research avenues, Bonnell admits to coming up with blanks. No birth certificate for Victor has been found. Nor is it ever likely to materialise. Adoption records are non existent, such documentation not being required until well into the second decade of the 20th Century when the process was legally formalised in New South Wales. The unfortunate loss by fire of the 1881 New South Wales household census forms was a likely calamitous blow for any would-be future biographer as it may have provided evidence of Victor’s place of residence when he was a mere toddler.

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Bonnell asks all the pertinent questions, circles around the “tiny handful of inconclusive facts” (including the tantalising prospect that Trumper was born a year later than commonly believed) and concludes that there’s only “the most minuscule chance of the question [of who Victor’s biological parents were ] being answered a century and a half later”. As a lawyer, Bonnell is well positioned to advise that circumstantial evidence and guesswork are often uncomfortable bedfellows.

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Ultimately, he concludes that, regardless of the “true nature” of the biological connection between Charles and Victor, the former carried out his fatherly duties in a caring and diligent fashion. Presumably, while not being explicit about Louisa’s maternal instincts, he assigns her much the same loving parental qualities.

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Beyond the matter of the subject’s birth, Bonnell handles all the regular family parameters with aplomb. United Kingdom ancestry, migration to and from Australia and New Zealand, marriages, births and deaths of siblings and others, and the sites of various family abodes in the inner Sydney suburbs during the period under review (broadly 1870-1900) are noted in a fashion far clearer than in the past. Added to which, specific sources of information are provided as endnotes. A small quibble with the extensive referencing from newspapers and the like. Page numbers of cited issues of broadsheets, tabloids, magazines and gazettes are not provided. For devotees driven to agonise over all materials this is more than a minor issue, one that could have been remedied by a mere click of the mouse.

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A matter of far greater consequence and perhaps the weakest (we are keen to suggest ‘least informative’ because, truly, the book is a superior product overall) element of Young Vic is the paucity of attention which Bonnell gives to poverty as an endemic feature of the Trumper domestic, community and commercial world. This lacuna is far from an unknown circumstance as the author himself acknowledges from the outset. Bonnell’s most explicit commentary about the pervasiveness of poverty in inner Sydney during the mid to late 19th Century is contained within two brief, albeit graphic, paragraphs:

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"For at least three generations, the Trumper family was stalked by premature death. Like most working-class people, they lived in cramped houses in inner-city suburbs, served by only the most primitive sanitation. Contagious bacteria thrived in these environments, where it could be hazardous simply to breathe the air or drink the water."

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And:

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"Surry Hills was not a comfortable neighbourhood. There’s a whole sub-genre of Australian fiction about the hardship of growing up poor in Surry Hills. Its small, dingy terrace houses were jammed up against factories and workshops in narrow, pungent streets. Drainage was inadequate, poverty endemic and crime was common…"

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Bonnell is onto something important here but baulks at consolidating his argument. Any number of selected passages from the fine body of Australian fiction that flags the desperate straits within which Australian middle- and lower-class urban dwellers toiled throughout the second half of the 19th Century and beyond, would have enlivened and coloured his account. Writers of the calibre of Ruth Park, Kylie Tennant, Lewis Rodd, Henry Lawson, Louis Stone, Christina Stead and, more recently, Helen Garner, among others, are all sensitive observers of the squalor of life in the Sydney slums, and, importantly, of the human capacity to ‘make do’ by various organisational, familial and personal means even without access to state welfare or religious and benevolent charity systems. In his short account, Bonnell has, perhaps through necessity, foregone an opportunity to provide an additional layer of insight by blending the heightened allure of fiction, with its capacity to allow the poor to speak for themselves, with his more prosaic narrative.

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The essence of Bonnell’s treatise is that, somehow, Victor Trumper, despite growing up in an environment of extreme vulnerability (notwithstanding that his father/elder male in the household was gainfully employed throughout the entirety of his youth), was able to survive, and indeed, thrive in his chosen field without any significant cricketing heritage.

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The explanation of this phenomenon is disappointingly thin. Fundamentally, Bonnell’s account fails to address the structural causes of poverty in New South Wales for the entirety of the period under review. As Anne O’Brien, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, wrote in the foreword to her seminal 1988 graphic portrayal of the extent of destitution in the “working man’s paradise”, Poverty’s Prison: The Poor in New South Wales 1880-1918 (5):

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"As the central economic unit, the family was very vulnerable: to fluctuations in the macroeconomy, to environmental pressures such as poor housing and serious illness, and to a patriarchal ordering of social relationships. It was also vulnerable to having too many dependent members at any one time, as well as to sheer bad luck. In analysing structural causes of poverty [my] book uncovers destitution in a land of plenty."

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Several disciplinary branches of Australian historical scholarship provide an impressively detailed and compelling theoretical body of work which describes and explains the grim realities of the final quarter of 19th Century urban life for the working classes. (6) Researchers include those with a focus on urban studies, social geography, social collectives, economic history, labour politics and the working classes, poverty, feminist history, transport and the family.  Some names that spring readily to mind include Jenny Lee, Shirley Fitzgerald, Max Solling, Christopher Keating, Brett Lennon, Garry Wotherspoon, Max Kelly, Eric Fry, Michael Gilding, Jill Roe and Robin Walker.  And the list goes on.

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It would have been useful for Bonnell to allude to the work of at least some of these diligent researchers and capable authors in contextualising the circumstances of Victor Trumper’s prodigious early cricketing stature in an otherwise unremarkable (for the times) upbringing. Two examples, below, suffice to suggest how such inclusions may have enhanced his account.

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First, given that the author focuses on Charles Trumper’s long career as a Sydney boot maker, “boot-clicker” or “clicker”, it seems appropriate to explore the extent to which pedestrianism remained the major form of transportation even in the last quarter of the 19th Century. A two or three mile walk to and from work at the factory or docks or building block was considered unexceptionable for the time. Horses were expensive to buy and fares for horse-drawn carriages were steep. A system of tramways (first steam and later electric) was established in Sydney between 1880 and 1884 as the city expanded to the west and, to a lesser extent, the south. However, the price of a trip from an inner suburb to the heart of the city was an initially prohibitive 3d. (7)

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As a corollary, knowledge about the number of tradesmen (skilled and unskilled) working in the shoe industry during this period and where they were located would be valuable. How competitive a trade was it and how cut-throat did manufacturing and retailing become as a consequence of changes in technology? What impact did mechanisation have on full time employment and on part-time and casual labour? And what was the typical wage of a factory employee? This is but one example of how contextualising a major commercial activity might enhance our appreciation of individual circumstances. So important if a family’s well-being was dependent on the breadwinner (overwhelming the father) mastering a trade and thereby ensuring his viability as a provider. (8)

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Shirley Fitzgerald (née Fisher), for many years the City of Sydney’s Historian, with overall responsibility for the collecting, cataloguing and displaying of the City Council’s historic archive, undertook a review of the urban workforce by occupational groups in the 1980s. Boot and shoemakers figure prominently in her oft quoted classic study Rising Damp. (9)  She describes how mechanisation of the boot industry saw a proliferation of factories in Sydney with a concomitant deskilling at the individual level but increased output per worker:(10):

 

"The total output of boots and shoes for Sydney in 1870 was estimated to be about 15,000 a week. The industry was strongly located in the city, and the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo immediately south of the city. Factories employed more hands, rather than proliferating. For the colony as a whole, the number of boot factories had been reduced over the twenty-year period, while employment doubled. In eight New South Wales factories over 100 hands were employed in 1891, with one factory employing 290."

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The wages paid varied according to skill, age (school-age boys and girls were often employed for a pittance) and gender, with male clickers, considered to be among the more expert and paid accordingly, earning perhaps as much as £2/10s a week in return for working 10-hour days “all year round”, as Bonnell notes from a column in the Sydney Morning Herald. (11)

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From another column in the same issue of the Herald, we learn that the overall Sydney labour market was tight with “general labourers of all classes walking about in large numbers” unable to procure work. However, the boot and shoe trade was less affected by the depression than other branches of industry, notwithstanding the fact that there was a “slackness of work” and [boot and shoe men were also] walking about”. In a quintessential Australian way, coopers were considered to be the “only tradesmen enjoying anything like brisk times”! (12)

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Charles’s bold decision, as described by Bonnell, to leave steady employment, which provided a reasonable wage, to establish his own shoemaking business (in partnership with Arthur Brown who likely provided the requisite financial capital) was full of risk. He likely realised that a fixed salary would always be insufficient to extricate his growing brood from strapped circumstances. He knew too that, in the mid to late 19th Century, people (more often than not women) tended to shop locally with Sydney already splintering into distinct socio-economic groups based on class divisions. (13)

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To this end it seems probable that Trumper and Brown marketed the wares of JW Ward Bootmaker in ways that promoted their standing within the local community. As Max Solling noted in his social history of the nearby suburb of Glebe, and which has relevance throughout the inner city, retailers and their wholesale suppliers, needed to rely on “the continuous patronage of a relatively small but fairly concentrated clientele”. (14)

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The pair’s prospects of commercial success would have been heavily dependent on their capacity to restrain manufacturing and labour expenses while maximising profits. Charles’s lengthy union affiliations (Bonnell points out that he was elected President of the Sydney branch of the Boot Trade Union in 1892) would seemingly have meant that he and Brown paid their employees wages at least the equivalent of their competitors. The business was successful enough over the course of the next several years for Charles to be able to relocate his family from a small Surry Hills rented tenement to a larger house in the more salubrious adjacent suburb of Paddington in 1896, and a short while later to an even airier terrace house in the same suburb. While still a tenant, he would by then have been optimistic of future prospects, perhaps even contemplating land and house ownership. (15)

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Extrapolating from known details, Bonnell fills in as much of this period of the Charles Trumper family saga as he can through assiduous research and careful assessment of motivation. His scholarship here is impressive. What he may usefully have added was that Charles possessed an exceptional degree of spirit and grit that helped him confront significant adversity and challenges. Qualities that could be witnessed by members of his close family circle and, perhaps, emulated and channelled into their own areas of endeavour. As an adult, Victor was an astute observer of life and behaviour, far more so than has been traditionally alleged and retold ad infinitum. In his formative years, the young man would have been fully aware of Charles’s determination to improve his, and his family’s, circumstances. And he would have admired his father’s doggedness to succeed.

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A key component of Bonnell’s treatise is attempting to explain the improbable. How did Victor Trumper’s ascendancy to cricketing grandeur occur given his socially humble beginnings? The overview of the early stages of Victor’s career from eagerness to participate as a youngster in regular morning practice on the green, open spaces around Moore Park, through his Fort Street Superior High School match performances and his emergence as a club and then representative cricketer of rare talent is well depicted. As is the sense of growing pride shown by his father as the teenager matures towards manhood. Yet there is a missing contextual feature of the late colonial New South Wales era which, with due consideration, has the potential to shine some light on the question as to how the young boy’s nascent talent at cricket expanded exponentially in an apparent familial sporting vacuum. This missing factor is the increasingly significant concept of contested sport, and recreational physical exercise more broadly, as an important element of popular culture.

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In the last quarter of the 19th Century the colonial working and wage earning classes in the inner, factory-dense, suburbs of Australian cities, and in some of the larger country towns, were defined by

their “patterns of housing, work and consumption”. (16) However, as Richard Waterhouse, among others, contends, they would also come to be distinguished, at a period when the luxury of leisure time was becoming more widespread, by recreational activities which were closely tied to their community identity and status. (17) As part of this process, particular aspirational values and competitive attitudes were attached to participating in contested games or watching others play.  Qualities such as setting goals, undertaking hard work, and testing oneself through personal risk and sacrifice, were becoming important features within the social and cultural milieu among the working classes of colonial society.

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Concurrently, there were also emerging ideas about club allegiances and neighbourhood affiliations, group co-operation, inclusiveness, and ethics of care between participants. Much of the essence of cricket, and of the game’s hallowed laws appear, at least superficially, to be wholly amenable to such ideals and beliefs. The momentum of this dynamic cultural force was burgeoning in New South Wales just as Victor Trumper, with a free-spirited mindset and with firm personal motivations, was just getting into his stride. His determination to succeed at his chosen sport was deeply rooted while he was still living at home with his parents and siblings.

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In this review two possible avenues for further development of Bonnell’s Young Vic, have been presented. There are other features of Trumper’s early days that could be expanded profitably. For example, more could be made of his school boy experiences. Charles Rudd’s personal account of his schooling at Fort Street in the first decade of the 20th Century in his A Gentle Shipwreck, an engrossing social history of the era, before and during the First World War (18), is a goldmine of intimate details which might add substance to what are generally known, bare-boned, generic facts of Trumper's years at the same school.

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Notwithstanding these suggestions, this reviewer has nothing but praise for Bonnell’s excellent crystallisation of the known circumstances of the formative years of Victor Trumper and for the additional details that he’s uncovered which add immeasurably to the information base about the cricketer’s early life. Although the author suggests that all that happened after Vic’s selection for the 1899 Ashes Tour of England is already known, and that as a consequence a biography is unnecessary, it seems there remains an opening for a diligent biographer to test that assertion.

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Peter Lloyd

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Notes:

(1)  G Haigh, "A Thousand Words", 1876, Summer 2024-25, pp28-31

(2)  Haigh, G. (2009) “Top Shot That”, Portrait 34, National Portrait Gallery. See: https://www.portrait.gov.au/magazines/34/top-shot-that

(3)  The population of Surry Hills in 1871 was around 15,000, doubling over the next twenty years. While housing stock (of poor quality) was increasing apace, overcrowding was becoming a significant problem, with “five or six people occupying a two- or three-room house”. See: M. Kelly (ed) (1978) Nineteenth Century Sydney, University of Sydney Press, Sydney, p. 71

(4)  O’Brien, A. (1988), Poverty's Prison: The Poor in New South Wales 1880-1918, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, p. 2

(5)  Jenny Lee and Charles Fahey provide an excellent summation of the reasons why the working classes in Australian cities did not share in the fruits of the periods of national economic boom between the early 1860s and about 1891. See: Lee, J and Fahey, C. (1986) “A Boom for Whom? Some Developments in the Australian Market, 1870-1891”, Labour History, Number 50, pp. 1-27

(6)  Wilson, R.et al (1970) The Red Lines: The Tramway System of the Western Suburbs of Sydney, Australian Electric Traction Association, Sydney, p. 7

(7) Fisher, S. (1985) “The family and the Sydney economy in the late nineteenth century” in P Grimshaw et al (eds) Families in Colonial Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, pp. 153-6

(8)  Fitzgerald, S. (1987) Rising Damp: Sydney 1870-90, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp. 147-50

(9) ibid, p 149

(10) Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 1880, p. 7. Fitzgerald reports 48 shillings a week for a male clicker and 23 shillings for a female doing the same work.

(11)  ibid

(12) Fitzgerald, S. (1987), op cit, p. 227

(13)  Solling, M. (2007) Grandeur and Grit: A History of Glebe, Halstead Press, Sydney, p. 10

(14)  See RV Jackson (1970), “Owner-Occupation of Houses in Sydney, 1871-1891, Australian Economic History Review: Urbanization in Australia, Volume X, No 2, pp. 138-54 for an account of the percentage of tenanted and owner-occupied private dwellings by Sydney suburb. The percentage of tenanted dwellings in Surry Hills in 1891 was 86 of 4,513 houses; and 77 percent in Paddington of 3,141 houses.

(15)  Solling, M. (2007), op cit, p. 181

(16)  Waterhouse, R. (1995) Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788, Longman, Sydney, pp. 112-14. See also Waterhouse, R. (1908) “Culture and Customs”, Dictionary of Sydney at https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/culture_and_customs

(17)  ​Rudd, LC (1975) A Gentle Shipwreck, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne

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And Cricketweb's review is here.

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