Carnage at Twilight

Martin Chandler | 8:19am BST 06 July 2025

Published: 2025
Pages: 16
Author: Musk, Stephen
Publisher: Red Rose Books
Rating: 3 stars

The fourth of Stephen Musk’s Monographs on North American Cricket moves on six years from the third, to 1897, and a visit to North America by a side led by ‘Plum’ Warner. It describes another victory for the Gentlemen of Philadelphia.

Musk begins with an interesting introduction that explains why the tour, which followed on almost straight away from the first major tour undertaken by the Philadelphians in England, took place at all.

The tour was not a long one, compromising just six matches, the last two of which were First Class matches. The two teams are introduced. Warner’s was of reasonable strength. All were First Class cricketers and Warner himself and ‘Shrimp’ Leveson-Gower both captained England overseas, albeit Leveson-Gower in particular was not really of Test quality. The best player in the side was a 23 year old Gloucestershire all-rounder, Gilbert Jessop, who had just done the double.

The two First Class matches showed the teams were evenly matched, as the Philadelphians won the first and Warner’s men the second. This is an account of the Philadelphian victory, and the reference to ‘carnage’ is to the tourists’ first innings, in which they were 63 all out, 9-25 from the legendary Bart King doing the damage.

For those interested in Philadelphian cricket this is an excellent contribution to the growing body of work on the subject. One of the limited edition of thirty copies can be had of the publisher or from Roger Page in Australia.